A Look at International Norms on Abortion and Reproductive Freedoms
By
Rosalyn Park
September 13, 2024
September 13, 2024
Rosalyn Park, Women's Human Rights Program Director, and Sarah Stoesz, past CEO and former President of Planned Parenthood North Central States and 2024 recipient of the Don and Arvonne Fraser Human Rights Award.
Come join us to learn more about how we protect women and girls' rights and join our efforts on Sept. 26, 5:30pm to 7:30pm at our fall house party. More information and registration is available here.
The Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade found the Constitution does not protect the right to an abortion. In doing so, the U.S. joined other countries that have severely restricted or outright banned abortion by law - Poland, Nicaragua, and El Salvador to name a few. But the Dobbs decision goes squarely against the tide of international standards recognizing that the right to abortion is a fundamental right.
It's important to recognize that the attacks we are seeing against reproductive freedoms are part of a bigger wave of coordinated, global attacks against human rights overall. The far-right movement is attacking numerous human rights: sexual and reproductive rights, LGBTIQ+ rights, overall women's rights, children's rights, and immigrants' rights. While the far-right movement uses a variety of tactics, there are three main ways they attack these rights:
- The far right promotes the "traditional family," which is their benevolent, supposed goodwill message. In reality, the "traditional family" is narrowly defined to mean a married, biological male husband, his biological female wife, and as many children as they can possibly have. The far-right movement preys on notions of "traditional" family and values to attack rights that fall under sexual and reproductive freedoms, like abortion, contraception, family planning, sex education, and of course, same-sex marriages and adoptions.
- The far right also fosters fear around demographic decline. By using a fear-mongering message that humans are going extinct because we are not having enough babies, they can again attack reproductive freedoms and services.
- The far right exploits feelings of nationalism and claim they do not want to fix the demographic population problem with immigrants. They portray immigrants as not holding the country's values and foster misperceptions that immigrants are violent. This, in turn, allows the far right to attack immigration rights and laws.
Thus, it's important to keep in mind that attacks on reproductive freedoms are intertwined in the far right's attacks against a bigger umbrella of human rights.
How do we know this? The Advocates has been investigating the far right movement for several years now. We've investigated their tactics, identified good strategies civil society is using to counter these harmful attacks, and are building a movement of human rights defenders to combat the far-right movement. One of the next strategies we are going to roll out is to begin bridging movements - we will be convening 50 human rights defenders in 2025 from both the LGBTIQ+ and women's rights movement to come together to strategize and unify against the far right. This is the first step toward bringing together allies who have historically not formally worked together, and we will continue to build and grow this movement.
Turning to the international sphere, it's important to recognize that international standards are evolving and are important benchmarks. There is a growing body of decisions and standards that recognize the different facets of abortion restrictions constitute a violation of human rights. The UN has recognized that when you restrict access to safe abortion, it violates:
- Right to life
- Right to health
- Right to equality
- Right to privacy
- Freedom from discrimination
- Freedom from torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment
Restrictions on abortions also constitute gender-based violence.
These standards are powerful tools for us and women's human rights defenders around the world to use. We can bring this closer to home with examples as to how these international standards play out in the U.S.
There were two separate cases of women in Ireland who were forced to travel to the UK for an abortion. They both had to travel about 150 miles. They brought their case to the UN to decide whether it violated their rights. In both cases, the UN found that forcing a woman to travel for an abortion constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment . Now think about a woman in neighboring Fargo, ND, Sioux Falls, SD, or Des Moines, IA who needs to travel even further (250 miles) to Minneapolis, MN to get an abortion. Under international standards, that's cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.
Let's examine a couple other examples. In South Dakota, abortion is a class 6 felony. But the UN has determined that laws that criminalize reproductive services are not okay. Countries must repeal laws that criminalize reproductive services, including abortion. In other words, where states have criminalized abortion here in the U.S., those laws are in violation of international standards. In another example, many U.S. states have waiting periods or biased counseling to redirect women to alternatives to abortion. The UN has called for countries to remove barriers to abortion, including mandatory waiting periods, a lack of respectful care, and third party authorization and notifications.
These international standards are tools we can use to hold the U.S. and other countries to account - they are global norms that the highest human rights bodies in the land have recognized. When we look at the situation, we need to remember there is accountability and there is an avenue to enforce these lifesaving standards.
Next September, the U.S. will be coming up for a human rights review before the UN - the very institution that set all these standards. This is our chance to bring these issues to the UN to point out where the U.S. fails to meet international standards. We have done this many times before with other countries, and we know we can impact the situation. With the ground-up pressure of activists here, combined with the top-down pressure of the UN, we can put the U.S. government into a pressure cooker and leverage those international norms to reclaim women and girls' rights here in the U.S. and around the world.
By Rosalyn Park, Women's Human Rights Program Director, The Advocates for Human Rights
Learn more about how we protect women and girls' rights and join our efforts on Sept. 26, 5:30pm to 7:30pm at our fall house party. Register here.
Issues:
International Advocacy
, Women's Rights
