The history and role of the criminal law in anti-FGM campaigns: Is the criminal law what is needed, at least in countries like Great Britain?

This article was published online in Reproductive Health Matters 2015;23(46):145-57. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.rhm.2015.10.001. Here is the abstract in English, French and Spanish:

Abstract

The history of campaigns against female genital mutilation (FGM) began in the 1920s. From the beginning, it was recognised that FGM was considered an important rite of passage between childhood and adulthood for girls, based on the importance of controlling female sexuality to maintain chastity and family honour, and to make girls marriageable. How to separate the “cut” from these deeply held norms is a question not yet adequately answered, yet I believe the answer is key to stopping the practice. Since the 1994 ICPD, national and international action against FGM has grown and resolutions have been passed in global forums which define FGM as a form of violence and a violation of children’s human rights. These resolutions have contributed to building consensus against FGM and developing national legislation criminalising FGM. Prosecutions or arrests involving FGM have been reported in several African countries and Great Britain, but apart from France, there have been very few. This paper summarises this history and how FGM has been criminalised. It argues that criminalisation may not be the best means of stopping FGM, but can have serious harmful effects itself. It calls for community-led educational information and more support for dialogue within FGM-practising communities, and argues that what is important is addressing the sexual and reproductive health consequences of FGM and gaining the understanding of women who have experienced it and their families as to why they should not make their daughters and grand-daughters go through it too.

Résumé

Les campagnes contre les mutilations sexuelles féminines (MSF) ont commencé dans les années 20. Dès le début, il a été admis que les MSF représentaient pour les filles un important rite de passage entre l’enfance et l’âge adulte, fondé sur l’importance du contrôle de la sexualité féminine afin de préserver la chasteté et l’honneur familial, et de permettre aux filles de se marier. Comment séparer la mutilation de ces normes profondément ancrées est une question encore sans réponse ; ce serait pourtant, à mon sens, une démarche essentielle pour mettre un terme à cette pratique. Depuis la CIPD, en 1994, l’action nationale et internationale contre les MSF s’est étendue et des forums internationaux ont adopté des résolutions qui définissent les MSF comme une forme de violence et une violation des droits fondamentaux de l’enfant. Ces résolutions ont contribué à dégager un consensus contre les MSF et à élaborer des législations nationales qui répriment cette pratique. Des poursuites ou des arrestations liées aux MSF ont été signalées dans plusieurs pays d’Afrique et en Grande-Bretagne, mais, à part en France, elles ont été très rares. L’article résume cette histoire et montre comment les MSF ont été sanctionnées par la loi. Il avance que cette pénalisation n’est peut-être pas le meilleur moyen de faire cesser les MSF et qu’elle peut avoir elle-même de graves conséquences. Il préconise une information éducative collective et davantage de soutien au dialogue au sein des communautés qui pratiquent les MSF. Il fait valoir qu’il est important de traiter les conséquences des MSF pour la santé sexuelle et génésique et de faire comprendre aux femmes qui les ont subies et à leur famille les raisons pour lesquelles elles ne devraient pas obliger leur fille ou leur petite-fille à en passer aussi par là.

Resumen

La historia de las campañas contra la mutilación genital femenina (MGF) comenzó en la década de 1920. Desde el principio, se reconoció que la MGF era considerada un importante rito de paso entre la niñez y la adultez para las niñas, basado en la importancia de controlar la sexualidad femenina para mantener castidad y el honor de la familia, y para preparar a las niñas para el matrimonio. Cómo separar el “corte” de estas normas tan arraigadas es una interrogante que aún no ha sido contestada adecuadamente; sin embargo, creo que la respuesta es clave para eliminar la práctica. Desde la CIPD de 1994, la acción nacional e internacional contra la MGF ha incrementado y se han aprobado resoluciones en foros mundiales que definen la MGF como una forma de violencia y una violación de los derechos humanos de las niñas. Estas resoluciones han contribuido a fomentar consenso contra la MGF y a formular leyes nacionales que penalizan la MGF. En varios países africanos y en Gran Bretaña se han reportado enjuiciamientos o arrestos relacionados con la MGF, pero aparte de Francia, ha habido muy pocos. En este artículo se resume esta historia y cómo la MGF ha sido penalizada. Se argumenta que la penalización quizás no sea el mejor medio para eliminar la MGF, ya que puede tener graves efectos dañinos. Se hace un llamado a la información educativa dirigida por la comunidad y a brindar más apoyo para el diálogo con las comunidades que practican la MGF. Se argumenta que lo importante es tratar las consecuencias de la MGF en la salud sexual y reproductiva y lograr que las mujeres que han pasado por esta experiencia y sus familias entiendan por qué no deben obligar a sus hijas y a sus nietas a hacer lo mismo.

Framework Convention on Global Health (FCGH) – a blog in response to the May 18 Geneva meeting minutes

A blog by Marge Berer, Editor Reproductive Health Matters. Originally posted on the blog of JALI – the Joint Action and Learning Initiative on National and Global Responsibilities for Health

I asked JALI if I could write a blog after I had read the minutes of the May 18 meeting in Geneva on the way forward for an FCGH,  to raise some issues that I’ve been confronting in the seemingly endless consultations and statements circulating on the internet on the post-2015 world – to do with what an MDG replacement would look like, whether or not universal health coverage as currently conceived is the answer to how to address health, and whether and where my issues of sexual and reproductive health and rights might fit into the “Sustainable Development Goals”, the most likely successor to the MDGs, when they have had such short shrift in the MDGs.

I was particularly struck by the paragraph on the two animating principles of a Framework Convention on Global Health mentioned in the minutes, that is, ‘global health equity (within and between countries) – “global health with justice,” as offered by Larry Gostin – and the right to health… setting clear standards to make it more concrete, measurable, and enforceable… addressing global governance for health… shifting international law towards health. It would ensure for all people the conditions required for health, including health care, public health, and social determinants of health, setting standards and establishing a national and global financing framework to enable universal access to and coverage of health care and public health measures (e.g., clean water, sufficient nutritious food)… directly address domestic inequities…[and] promoting Health in All Policies.’ (pp.2-3)

Just as people in the meeting raised the fact that some participants in the FCGH process required more explicit attention, e.g. health workers and health worker unions, as did some issues, e.g. mental health, I would like to raise three aspects that I think need to be part of the FCGH discussions:

i. Gender issues – that is, the differences between men and women in their health needs, their access to health and health care, and the inequities in that differential access. Gender issues in relation to health are crucial to any convention. There has been a lot of work by women’s health advocates on gender issues in relation to women’s health but far less work by either men or women on gender issues in relation to men’s health. In the same ways as girls’ and women’s health issues were at one time almost invisible in the previous century, attention to boys’ and men’s health issues has not been developed in the past 30 years, in spite of the growing attention to women’s health issues and wide-ranging work on gender, both in academia, by the women’s health movement and even in WHO. In a recent paper I was considering for publication, for example, it was said that gender-based violence against women was the most common form of violence, when in fact men experience far more violence globally overall, but between each other, whereas women experience violence mostly from men. Thus, work is needed on how to address gender issues within an FCGH in relation to the right to health, the social determinants of health, health financing, etc, and how this might be approached needs much more thought and consideration.
ii. Religious, political and “cultural” opposition to what an FCGH would stand for, being used most vocally today to justify why access to crucial aspects of health and health care related to sexuality and reproduction are being withheld and denied, and many sexual and reproductive rights condemned and criminalised. Underlying this opposition are two forms of hate: misogyny and hatred of any form of sexuality that is not heterosexual and heteronormative.

One of the reasons I support a Convention is that it would give greater weight to all these issues by requiring not only non-discrimination and equality, but also regular examination, analysis and critique of country programmes, along with official recommendations for policy and programmes, and demands for accountability and action through interpretation of the implementation of the convention. We are beginning to see such a framework making a difference in relation to sexual and reproductive rights issues, particularly via the work of CEDAW. So I recommend studying CEDAW’s history, functions, and procedures particularly and how they might be applied more broadly across health. I would be interested in being involved in this in the future.

iii. The process of developing the successor to the MDGs may cut out the few specific aspects of health and health care that were allowed into MDG 5, where they were mostly reduced to their lowest common denominator and stripped of their complexity, e.g. universal access to reproductive health was a late add-in to MDG 5, which never moved beyond superficial attention to a few aspects of reducing maternal mortality, diluted heavily by tacking newborns, infants and children onto “maternal” health, and omitting the great majority of interlinked sexual and reproductive health problems.

Universal health coverage in my opinion may also succeed in shortcutting and eliminating the “controversial issues” in whatever is included under a “unified health goal” post-2015, and it may also make support for addressing specific aspects of health equally or even more difficult. Having devoted two recent issues of Reproductive Health Matters to privatisation in sexual and reproductive health services, where articles provided evidence of a resulting increase in inequity of access to health care among the 4th and 5th socioeconomic quintiles of many African and Asian countries, I am worried that the health goal that is eventually agreed is likely to be biased one way or another towards consumerism, commercialisation and privatisation of health and health services, and their financial underpinnings such as health insurance. I am very uncertain of the value of what has emerged so far as regards universal coverage from WHO, given the pressure on the agency from the World Bank, big pharma, world trade policies, and the influence of private/foundation donors, when measured against what we would like to see as the basis for the Framework Convention on Global Health.

 

The Brazilian government pays compensation for a maternal death taken up by CEDAW – a decision that has global implications

Lisa Hallgarten, RHM

The Brazilian government has agreed to pay compensation for the death of a pregnant woman in 2002. The decision could have implications for governments around the world where women are dying from preventable deaths in pregnancy, childbirth and abortion. The Brazilian government’s move follows landmark decisions by the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) in Brazil and Peru – reported in Reproductive Health Matters. CEDAW confirmed that all states have a human rights obligation to: guarantee good quality maternal health care; guarantee access to abortion when a woman’s mental or physical health is threatened by continuation of her pregnancy; and decriminalise abortion when the pregnancy results from rape or abuse.

The case of of Alyne da Silva Pimentel v. Brazil was taken up by CEDAW in 2011. Alyne died following a stillbirth towards the end of her second trimester of pregnancy as a result of misdiagnosis, inadequate treatment in her local health centre, failure of the centre to refer her for timely emergency obstetric care and inadequate care when she was finally referred. CEDAW found that she was a victim of discrimination because she was a woman, poor and of African descent. Following the CEDAW Committee’s recommendations, the Brazilian government has agreed to pay compensation for Alyne’s death in childbirth, and is to set up an inter-ministerial enquiry into where responsibility lies for the chain of events that result in a maternal death. It also plans to organise a seminar on the issue for lawyers and health professionals.

In the case of L.C. v. Peru, a young girl had been repeatedly raped by different men in her neighbourhood over a period of four years. At the age of 13 she learned that she was pregnant and made a suicide attempt which failed, but left her at risk of paralysis and in urgent need of spinal surgery. She was refused the surgery she needed because she was pregnant, and was also refused an abortion. Three months later she miscarried and doctors agreed to perform the surgery. Unfortunately the delay meant the intervention was unsuccessful and L.C. is now quadriplegic. Peruvian law already permits abortion in cases where a woman’s health or life is at risk. CEDAW ruled that access to abortion in these cases should be guaranteed.

CEDAW’s findings come in the context of legal and civil actions around the world aimed at making governments accountable for women’s health and lives in pregnancy, childbirth and abortion. We hope that the announcement from Brazil that it will act on CEDAW’s recommendations may encourage Peru to do so too, and will  help to reinforce the fundamental principle that women’s rights are human rights.

Other cases highlighted in RHM

Alyne’s case and the negligent, callous and discriminatory treatment she experienced, has echoes in stories we have published from all over the world including the testimony of a doctor in a sub-Saharan African country on this blog. Papers in May’s issue of Reproductive Health Matters demonstrate that failure to provide good quality, equitable and accessible maternal health care is widespread. Increasingly however, lawyers, families and health professionals have had some success in holding their governments and health services to account.

In India an investigation into maternal deaths in Madhya Pradesh documented lack of accountability, and discrimination against poor women, particularly tribal women. However, the authors report that since presenting the report some of their recommendations have been taken up. In another article from India authors explore the successful legal case made for compensation and accountability for the death of Shanti Dev in Haryana State.

Another article reports on opportunities for progress that could be learned from the success of HIV activism in sub-Saharan Africa where health professionals and civil society activists have formed alliances to demand constitutional rights to health care for people living with HIV. A recent attempt by health activists in Uganda to use the courts to establish the constitutional rights of women to quality maternal health care failed, but the NGOs involved have promised to appeal…watch this space.

Read the full editorial of RHM’s recent issue Maternal mortality or women’s health: time for action

China: how can the one-child policy and rights-based family planning be reconciled in the face of recently reported abuses?

Lisa Hallgarten, RHM social media and communications

Marge Berer, RHM editor

Two recent news stories from China have reawakened concern about overzealous enforcement of China’s one-child policy and the emergence of voices critical of the policy and its implementation. Historically, being a country with 25% of the total world population within its borders, China’s population policy has addressed a unique set of social, demographic and political circumstances, and overall, it appears to have had widespread support from the public. However, these two reports have resonated internally and far beyond its shores.

In the United States, the story of Chen Guangcheng ,the Chinese civil rights activist imprisoned and persecuted for exposing and protesting against abuses of women being forced to have abortions against their will, in the name of Chinese government policies, has been co-opted by anti-abortion US activists. Though he has spoken out mainly against the brutality of forced abortions, not abortion per se, he is being used as a poster boy by the US anti-abortion, anti-contraception movement. Stories of forced abortion, and other human rights abuses associated with the one-child policy, are being presented as the logical conclusion of all and any family planning policies.

In one of two recent stories that hit the press due to US publicity, a mother of one was snatched from her home and forced to have an abortion. The procedure went tragically wrong and just hours later the 38-year-old woman was dead.  In another report, a woman who was seven months pregnant was also forced to have an abortion.  The story and pictures of the woman lying beside the aborted fetus were posted on the internet, generating over a million hits on Chinese social media networks. In response, the officials in the second of these cases lost their jobs and were prosecuted  More recently the women was given financial compensation as well.

At the same time, a flurry of anecdotes from other parts of China have started to emerge about the practice of forced abortions: contradicting the official party line that such practices – especially abortions in late pregnancy – are illegal, rare and not countenanced by the government.

A look at the Population and Family Planning Law of China  is instructive. It aims to maximise contraceptive use and minimise population growth by providing local and district officials with financial and other rewards for meeting family planning targets. The motivation this might create for officials to be overzealous in their implementation of the policy is tempered with tepid instructions not to infringe the rights of women and families and to promote family planning using incentives rather than coercion. In one of the cases above, the woman and her husband were threatened with a huge fee if they wished to continue the pregnancy, which they could not have afforded. This raises questions of which incentives and disincentives, if any, are acceptable to the population, how to prevent coercion, what to do when it happens, and what rights women have to redress and compensation when coercion has been shown to take place. Underlying these questions are broader policy issues – whether it is possible to reconcile the need to limit population growth with its attendant targets for coverage of contraception and even abortion.

The Family Planning Summit in London this month said that the funding associated with the new FP Initiative will explicitly NOT be used to support coercive family planning. It did, however, set ambitious targets for contraceptive coverage, though when criticism was raised, the language was changed to read contraceptive access. Whether it will be possible to achieve a huge increase in contraceptive use without incentives and targets, and how this relates to donor expectations with “results-based financing”, remain on the table for discussion. The consequences for informed choice and the right to use or not to use a method hang in the balance. At the same time, given the many barriers to accessing as well as using contraception successfully in the world’s most underserved communities, there will be enormous pressure to prove that the initiative really can give 120 million more women access to contraception.

The anti-abortion, anti-contraception movement would love to discredit the whole programme, as they have sought to do for years in the United States as regards the Chinese policy. Everyone who supports the right to control fertility needs to be committed to ensuring that any new programmes providing contraception will have women’s rights at their heart in practice. If they don’t, this one-off commitment of money may never be repeated.

Also in the news on this issue:
A group of Chinese scholars have written an open letter calling for revision of the one-child policy. They argue that the policy is bad for human rights and also for sustainable economic development.  Some Chinese demographers have said the one-child policy will damage the country as low fertility rates threaten a shortfall in the productive labour force needed to fund the ageing population.

We have no idea whether these statements are typical of public views. The public debate that has ensued inside China since these reports have come out must be multi-faceted and far from one-sided. We would be happy to receive further reports of the many points of viewbeing expressed in this debate, including by the government, as it unfolds within China.

Family planning and safe, legal abortion go hand in hand

Marge Berer

Editor, Reproductive Health Matters

One in three women in the UK will have an abortion in her lifetime, most of whom will have been using contraception of some kind. Yet since as long ago as the late 1930s, there has been a split in the UK between those who insisted on promoting contraception on its own because they thought abortion was too controversial and would hold back acceptance of family planning, and those who insisted that the two go hand in hand. This split exists in many countries, not just the UK, and also within many organisations with a large membership in different countries, such as the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF). It is reflected most recently in a comparison of the list of 600 groups and individuals who have endorsed the International Campaign for Women’s Right to Safe Abortion this year, and the 1300 that signed a letter circulated by the IPPF supporting the Family Planning Initiative – very different groups are on those lists. Yet all of them support the right to control fertility.

In 1994, the ICPD Programme of Action, a consensus document on the integration of sexual and reproductive health and rights, was only able to be passed if it included a “compromise” clause that called for abortion to be safe only if it was legal. This compromise was and remains a violation of public health principles and women’s human rights. ICPD failed to condemn the often 19th century, often colonial laws on abortion still in place in the criminal code in many countries. However, the Programme of Action did recognise that unsafe abortion was a major public health problem, one which to this day still affects some 22 million women every year, among whom 5 million end up in hospital with complications annually and tens of thousands die (WHO, Guttmacher). And young women, whom everyone wants to be  seen to be supporting these days, are in fact most at risk of unsafe abortion and also have the least access to contraception (Shah & Åhman, RHM, May 2012).

The answer is not to promote contraception in order to reduce unsafe abortion, as the FP Summit did. The answer is to promote contraception to reduce unwanted pregnancy and provide safe abortion to every woman who finds herself with an unwanted pregnancy. That is the way to make unsafe abortion history. Abortion will not go away unless men and women stop having sex with each other or everyone is sterilised. So forget it! The growing number of countries in both the north and south, east and west, where there is 60-80% contraceptive prevalence proves that. Research shows that women and men take up contraception in large numbers if they feel they have the right to control their fertility and have access to the means to do so. There is a huge need for information, because every new generation of young women and men will know nothing about contraception or abortion unless they have access to this information. But there is no need for “demand creation”, a retrograde concept which implies lack of interest. The steadily falling fertility rate globally, falling since the 1970s, proves that, and in every country, abortion is in there, safe or unsafe, reducing the number of births. Forty-four million abortions globally and hundreds of millions of people using contraception and sterilisation prove the huge demand for the means of fertility control. “Unmet need” is more than just lack of knowledge or interest on the part of the women and men who aren’t using contraception, or using it erratically or unsuccessfully.

Women seek an abortion if they have an unwanted pregnancy, legal and safe or not, because it’s too late for contraception. There is no split between contraception and abortion from women’s perspective, they are two sides of the same coin. Even so, many of the biggest supporters of “family planning” refuse to support women’s need for safe, legal abortion. Even worse, they always talk about abortion in negative terms. They mention it along with STIs, as if it were a disease, or treat it as an annoying problem that they wish would go away, and consider it inferior to use of contraception. They even claim that use of contraception will (or should) make it go away. But this is about the realities of people’s sex lives and how sex happens, not just about well-thought-out, planned-in-advance decisions about family formation. Many pregnancies are started without any forethought at all, and all too often as one of the consequences of sexual pressure and coercion.

Campaigns for women’s right to safe, legal abortion have been going on for at least 100 years. Many of us involved in these campaigns are still seen as annoying by people who are supposed to be our colleagues. We’re told it’s sensitive, controversial, difficult, it can’t be put on the agenda, including in the FP Summit. At the same time, many of us who are fighting for abortion rights stopped supporting “family planning” years ago, because of what happened in the past, when coercive programmes put many people off “family planning” and gave it a bad name. Some family planning supporters have blamed ICPD for the neglect of family planning, because it placed family planning in a wider context. But as Gita Sen said at the Summit, ICPD in fact sought to rehabilitate family planning and restore its good name, while the barriers to safe abortion were left in place.

Today’s supporters of family planning would like everyone to forget the coercive programmes of the past, which were target-based. But they may yet become target-based again because of “results-based financing”. So let’s not confuse opposition to coercive family planning policies with being anti-family planning. Yet, it is absolutely true that provision of contraception has been neglected in recent years – and yes, this neglect must stop. At the same time, neglect also characterises how women’s unmet need for safe abortion is treated. What needs to change is that both forms of unmet need should be taken into account – together – starting with donor and national government policies.

For example, although DFID’s development aid policy has long been to fund both family planning services and abortion services, in their roll-out of these policies, funding for family planning is (I am told) separated from funding for safe abortion. That is, it is managed by different people and in different programmes within DFID and in the recipient countries, and these different people may not work closely together or know what each other are doing. Yet DFID did not see a problem in agreeing to a family planning initiative in which funding for abortion is excluded. They fund abortions anyway, they say, so what’s the problem? The problem is that separating abortion from family planning at the programmatic level allows some countries to keep abortion legally restricted and not take responsibility for unsafe abortion.

Then there’s the US, where support for family planning by USAID has been the highest in the world for many years now, while safe abortion services are not funded by them at all. Since ICPD, however, the US has funded post-abortion care, which was invented at ICPD as a way to save women’s lives who had had an unsafe abortion. Unfortunately, the evidence that post-abortion care has in fact saved many women’s lives since ICPD is sparse and not compelling. Yes, the number of deaths from complications of unsafe abortion has fallen a lot, but this may be due to self-medication with misoprostol replacing life-threatening methods.

In fact, once ICPD was over, this so-called post-abortion care should have been rejected as unethical, because it allows harm to be done unchallenged and forces health care providers to clean up the mess without the support of the law. Under US aid policy, even countries where abortion is legal who tried to use USAID funds for safe abortions as well as for contraception and sterilisation, in integrated programmes, had their “family planning” funding stopped. Research has now shown that this leads to higher rates of unwanted pregnancies and abortions in those very same countries, proving how illogical such a policy is/was. Will that evidence, published only recently, lead to a change in USAID policy? Unlikely. Too sensitive. And meanwhile, a violent and fanatical anti-abortion movement flourishes in the US, where some of the most punitive and misogynistic barriers to safe abortion are being implemented with near impunity, in one state after another.

The anti-abortion movement is also anti-family planning. For years, they were very circumspect about this as they feared, quite rightly, that it would lose them support. But the current Vatican has helped to bring anti-abortion opposition to contraception and assisted conception out in the open again. This is evidenced in campaigns to ban emergency contraception and assert conscientious objection to providing contraceptives, e.g. by pharmacists. But still, many in the family planning movement do not support the right to safe abortion.

In light of the Family Planning Summit, it is a good time for abortion rights activists who have ignored family planning to link up with the family planning movement, and help to ensure that services have a rights-based approach. It is also a good time for all family planning colleagues to support the right to safe, legal abortion alongside the right to access contraception and sterilisation – and talk about abortion as a legitimate part of fertility control, a solution to unwanted pregnancy, a public health necessity for women, and a legitimate health care service. All of us should acknowledge the huge unmet need for safe, legal abortion services as well as for contraception and sterilisation services, and ensure that they are provided – and funded – together.

Many effective contraceptive methods, condoms, two types of emergency contraceptive pill and two very safe methods of early abortion – all on the WHO essential medicines list – can and should be provided at primary health care level. This includes medical abortion pills and manual vacuum aspiration for abortions up to 9-10 weeks. Some of these can even be provided during home visits by community-based health workers – the pill, condoms, injectables, emergency contraceptive pills and medical abortion pills for early abortions – as long as there are nurses, nurse-midwives or other mid-level providers who have been trained to do so. The evidence is there– this is all safe and effective. Moreover, the legitimate sort of post-abortion care, i.e. the kind that happens after safe abortions, needs to include information about and provision of contraception, just as post-partum care ought to do. So, even programmatically and clinically, the integration of family planning and abortion makes more sense than ever.

The morning after: the beginnings of an assessment of the FP Summit

Marge Berer
Editor, Reproductive Health Matters

13 July 2012

From a communications point of view, the FP Summit was a raving success. Newspapers, TV and radio all over the world covered it. Around the globe everyone reached by the media heard how wonderful family planning is and how neglected it has been, the Lancet launched a special edition , Guttmacher and others released facts and figures showing the extent of unmet need. Across the women’s health movement the listserves, Facebook and Twitter were full of it. All in all, the day – and many of the messages it gave birth to – had enthusiastic, even missionary, overtones.

On the absolutely fabulous side, Melinda Gates’ challenge to the Pope to acknowledge that contraception is ‘not controversial’ even amongst Catholic women, is likely to rock the foundations of the Vatican’s whole policy on abstinence, condoms and contraception from the grassroots of the Catholic church up. It was God’s gift to Catholics for Choice, who will be promoting Condoms-for-Life and safer sex at the upcoming AIDS conference later this month.

Also on the plus side, there were representatives of governments and many, many others who are making progressive change happen in their countries, and who spoke out about it. These are people who can make a big difference when they get home who did support comprehensive sexual and reproductive health and rights from the podium and the floor of the meeting, and who insisted that family planning services can only be provided within that wider remit. There were people who needed to learn what it was all about, some of whom were too young to have lived the history, but who came with strong pro-choice views.

The media exposure of the value of family planning has a huge potential for good, because it will have reached people who didn’t know family planning existed or whether it’s good for them and safe, and others who have never had a chance to talk about these matters with others. It will also have put fertility control as a public good on the map around the world. And hopefully it will spur those with expertise in sexuality and reproduction to start talking about what they know, and what is and is not true amongst all the hoopla – and to assert that the power of money must not be allowed to take precedence over public health values and human rights principles, or the values of knowledge and truth.

On the oh-God-help-us-no-no-no side, though, Melinda Gates anointed herself as the new saviour of women’s and children’s health, and the press ate it up in both pictures and words. Some of the best people in the field of sexual and reproductive health, were unexpectedly uncritical, singing the praises of this wonderful opportunity. Perhaps not surprising given the historical shortfall in funding for family planning.

A golden moment, the kind that big money and a Tory government are at home in, stage-managed by a slick public relations company called McKinsey (who describe themselves as “the trusted advisor and counsellor to many of the world’s most influential businesses and institutions”). With big pharma, having abandoned contraceptives for many years, talking about the opportunity (“70% of this market is under-served”) to make a profit from family planning needs and then give some of it back to women – as a charitable gift. Patting each other on the back for being so wonderful as to finally have recognised that women have health needs they can exploit. A truly Hollywood event, except this is not entertainment. This is women’s lives.

This golden moment, which had to happen mainly because so many governments have failed to take responsibility for the public health needs of their citizens, for maternal health, family planning, abortion, sexual health, in the only equitable manner that works – by providing publicly funded, well-resourced services.

It was a day that showed the world it was possible for one very well-meaning woman, backed by the power and money of her husband, to direct global policy and claim ownership of the provision of family planning to 120 million women and at the same time, to disparage and stigmatise women’s need for abortion to the entire world – and get away with it without being challenged. She had the courage to challenge the Pope. It is a shame that a summit attended by many of the world’s experts on these subjects could not emulate her bravery and challenge her in return.

She was not the only one who got away with it. The Summit also gave the podium to and applauded politicians from countries where millions of women have the very unmet need for contraception in whose name this Summit was called: women who are still dying from unsafe abortions because their governments are too cowardly to make abortion legal and safe; and women who are dying from complications of pregnancies because they have no access to life-saving maternity care. Countries that since the 1960s have received hundreds of millions if not billions of US dollars for family planning, which have as good as disappeared, or been squandered and misspent.

It included representatives of the very same private sectors whose services and prices for contraceptive methods and safe abortions remain inaccessible to and unaffordable for many in the world’s population who need them, especially young women and men. And not only in low- and middle-income countries, but also in the United States, a country whose health industry has made life hell for Barack Obama for trying to make health care even a little bit more affordable, excluding abortion of course, for millions of disenfranchised people. The United States – a country that has the biggest and most violent and aggressive anti-abortion movement on earth, second only to the Vatican, and some of the highest unintended pregnancy rates in the developed world, especially among poor women.

It was addressed by the Prime Minister of the UK, the Right Honourable David Cameron, who got a standing ovation for a speech about the importance of empowering women, a speech that stank of hypocrisy. A Prime Minister who is responsible for indefensible, swingeing spending cuts that are adversely affecting women, young people and children above all, including cuts in family planning, sexual health services and welfare, at a time when it has never before cost so much to raise a family. Whose Secretary of State for Health is selling off our National Health Service piece by piece, who has wasted public time and at least £1 million in public money harassing some of the real heroes of women’s rights, that is, abortion service providers, for no credible reason. Whose Minister for Public Health put an anti-abortion group on the government’s sexual health advisory group “for the sake of balance” and to propitiate anti-abortion fanatics in Parliament – a Minister who described abortion as a “sensitive” issue, after 45 years of safe, legal abortions (except for women in Northern Ireland, of course).

And now it’s the morning after. How to go on from here and engage in what will happen? It’s a pity about Melinda Gates’ prejudices against abortion. I hope she will reconsider them because it would make her a far more credible ambassador for this cause which, after all, does not belong to her.

Making change happen is in the air

Marge Berer

Editor, Reproductive Health Matters

Below, are excerpts from my editorial in RHM 20(39) May 2012. This issue is about reducing maternal mortality, but the more I reflected on it the more I realised it had implications for this week’s summit on family planning.

Making change happen is in the air, from the UN Secretary-General down to the most remote village… Yet, in certain ways, the world is moving backwards when it comes to dealing with women and pregnancy. Simone Diniz calls it a return to “materno-infantilism” – treating pregnant women like children who need looking after… Today, in much of the literature, all pregnant women are called “mothers” whether they’ve ever had a baby or not. Yet pregnancy has more than one outcome and is not only about women who “deliver”. It’s also about women who experience miscarriages, stillbirths, infant deaths, lack of access to contraception, unwanted pregnancies, unsafe abortions, and lifelong obstetric, reproductive and sexual morbidity. Yet these are nearly invisible in PMNCH these days, and safe abortion – an integral part of women’s right to decide the number and spacing of their children – may be made invisible in the new Family Planning Initiative as well…

The papers [in this journal issue] show that some countries are making serious efforts at strengthening and improving their health systems in relation to reproductive health care and maternity services. Based on data that show who is dying and why, they are making policy and programme changes, such as low-cost delivery services for poor and migrant women, opening new obstetric emergency care and referral centres in hospitals, training more health professionals, and providing health education for women, as in Shanghai (Du et al)…

Others are strengthening the whole public health system, especially in rural areas where most poor women live, ensuring better leadership and governance, increasing health workforce skills, supporting community-based health insurance, and increasing contraceptive services, as in Rwanda (Bucagu et al). They’re promoting peace, stability, economic growth, poverty reduction, improved primary education, better roads and communications, access to information on health and health services, and making health care free of cost for the poor, as in Cambodia (Liljestrand & Sambath)…

In contrast, in some countries, appalling, chaotic, uneven, negligent and abusive situations persist. Among the 22 million women each year who have unsafe abortions, adolescents suffer the most from complications and have the highest unmet need for contraception (Shah & Åhman). Custom, lack of perceived need, distance, lack of transport, lack of permission from husbands, cost, unwillingness to see a male doctor are still preventing women from seeking antenatal and delivery care, e.g. in northern Nigeria (Doctor et al), but in many places, these services barely exist anyway…

In the poorest of countries, women may have more pressing health needs even than for maternity care, e.g. in Haiti, where women identified access to any affordable health care, potable water, enough food to eat, any employment, sanitation and education as their most crucial problems (Peragallo Urrutia et al)…

Even more broadly, lack of national commitment has been identified as critical in 33 sub-Saharan African countries, as well as very low levels of public financing for health and health services (let alone maternity services), poor coordination between key stakeholders and partners, poorly functioning health systems with poor logistics for supply, distribution and management of essential medicines, family planning commodities, and equipment, and a chronic shortage of skilled health professionals (Ekechi et al).

In several South Asian countries, cash is being given to pregnant women to deliver in facilities, but some studies are finding, e.g. in India, that when women arrive, there is limited or no antenatal care, no birth attendants with midwifery skills, no emergency obstetric care in obvious cases of need, and referrals that never result in treatment (Subha Sri et al). And now, these same women have a sense of entitlement, and they are protesting.

Several governments in Latin America may be embarrassed to learn that their levels of budget transparency in spending on specific aspects of maternity care were found to be very low, and that they need better budgeting modalities, better health information systems and guidelines on how they might better capture data on expenditure, in order to track and plan local and national progress (Malajovich et al). Similarly, an assessment of cash transfer and voucher schemes designed to stimulate demand for services and reduce cost barriers to maternity care found increased use of maternity services in several south Asian countries, but also a need for more efficient operational management, financial transparency, plans for sustainability, evidence of equity and, above all, proven impact on quality of care and maternal mortality and morbidity (Jehan et al).

The papers [in this journal issue] describe a range of models for advocacy and taking action to expose violations of human rights, poor public health practices, absence of monitoring and regulation, failure to ensure national accountability for sexual and reproductive rights and to provide remedies and redress in the event of violations (Kismödi et al).

full editorial

Botched motherhood

A poem by Tiro Sebina – featured in Reproductive Health Matters May 2012
You may not want to hear
About a woman who died
In labour in a hut

You may not want to hear
About an expectant woman
Who perished aboard
A donkey cart
On a bumpy road to an apology
Of a health post
With neither doctors on site
Nor drugs in sight

You may not want to hear
About an expectant woman’s fatal fall
Off a rickety bike
Pedalled by a drunken man
Terrified of Emang Basadi
Concerned about his name
Appearing on the birth certificate

You may not want to hear
About a woman who expired
Without knowing
She was targeted by grand visions
And millennium schemes

You may not want to know
About a woman too hapless
To grace dinner-conferences
Held in her name
At exclusive venues

Who wants to know
About the bungled chaos
Of a dead mother

All I had to do was take a pill every day, I was told, and hey presto, I didn’t have to worry about getting pregnant!

Marge Berer, Editor, Reproductive Health Matters

I was among the first generation of women in the 1960s to experience the miracle of the pill just at the age when I was wanting to start having sex. All I had to do was take a pill every day, I was told, and hey presto, I didn’t have to worry about getting pregnant if I didn’t want to, and it worked! But oh, if only it had all turned out to be that easy! Like one in three women in the UK today, a country where contraceptive prevalence is almost as high as it can get, I needed an abortion several years later. Again, I was lucky, the 1967 Abortion Act meant I was able to get a legal abortion. The lesson is simple – while contraception continues to be a miracle, because it helps people not to have children if and when they don’t want to, it is not enough on its own and it never has been.

Family planning has been out of the news for a long time, and suddenly it’s back. Welcome!! Bring out the red carpet, and I mean it!! Women and men need contraception now as much as they have ever done, and young women and men who are beginning to explore their sexuality together need contraception and condoms more than anyone. But there has been a lot of water under the bridge since family planning was promoted as the cure-all for the world’s ills in the 1960s when the pill came out, and everyone needs to study that history anew so that the same mistakes, of which there have been many, and the same narrow vision, are not repeated.

My generation of women’s health activists, along with a whole generation of researchers, service providers and policymakers who brought their knowledge together at the International Conference on Population and Development in 1994, got the world to recognise that the need for the means to control fertility, which is as old as history itself, was part of a much broader set of needs related to reproduction and sexuality, and that these were inextricably connected. These include: being able to have sex without fear of negative outcomes, being able to have sex if and only if we want to and only with whom we want to, being able to have the children we want, being able to get pregnant at all, being able not only to survive pregnancy but also still be in good health, being able to have a safe abortion without fear of death or condemnation when an unwanted pregnancy occurs, being able to protect ourselves from sexually transmitted diseases, and being able to get treatment for all the many causes of reproductive and sexual ill-health, which start with menstruation and menstrual problems, and continue into old age with things like breast and prostate cancer and uterine prolapse.

There is indeed a huge unmet need in today’s world, but the unmet need for contraception is only a fraction of the unmet need for sexual and reproductive health, and for sexual and reproductive rights. The results we should be working for encompass every aspect of the issues I have just named, and those in turn must be seen in the even wider context of the right to health, social justice and an end to poverty and violence – which were the real point of the Millennium Development Goals – not the measurable targets.

I will be blogging about these issues in the light of the FP Summit over the next weeks – watch this space!

Trends in maternal mortality 1990-2010: latest data

by Marge Berer

Editor Reproductive Health Matters

Thanks to the Millennium Development Goals and much work on the part of the UN, WHO, many governments and NGOs globally and nationally, the press and media are now highly attuned to what is happening as regards maternal mortality. An announcement by WHO on behalf of the United Nations of the latest global estimates, published in May 2012, showed that the trend in maternal deaths appears to be falling overall, and resulted in many newspaper articles sharing this very good news. The global data were as follows:

• The number of women dying due to complications of pregnancy, childbirth and unsafe abortion decreased from 543,000 in 1990 to 358,000 in 2008, and 287,000 in 2010.

This excellent news masks the fact that there has been a lot of change in some countries and virtually none in others. Here are some of the details of those differences, taken from the report:

• Deaths are falling quickly in East Asia but the reduction is attributed largely to China.
• Southern African countries have seen the beginnings of a reversal, but sub-Saharan Africa (56%) and southern Asia (29%) accounted for 85% of the global burden in 2010.
• India (19%) and Nigeria (14%) alone accounted for a third of deaths globally.
• 40 countries (20 % of the total number of countries) still have maternal mortality ratios greater than 300 deaths per 100,000 live births.
• Countries with the highest maternal mortality ratios were: Chad, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Central African Republic, Burundi, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Sudan, Cameroon, and Nigeria; Lao PDR, Afghanistan, Haiti, Timor-Leste – these are among the world’s poorest countries, many of which are also sites of conflict, war and other crisis situations, such as earthquakes and flooding.

In other words, many countries still have very high maternal mortality ratios, including two very large countries, which account for a large proportion of deaths. Moreover, there is a growing gap between countries where improvements have taken place and many of the poorest countries, where most women are still simply not benefiting. Furthermore, as the May 2012 edition of RHM shows, there are differences within countries and between women (according to socioeconomic status, rural vs urban status, age and marital status) that are sometimes great and must not be ignored. The paper by Shah and Ahman, for example, shows that unsafe abortion deaths remain high in many countries and that young women are at the greatest risk of death and complications from unsafe abortion. A study in Nigeria shows that women in northern Nigeria are at far greater risk of maternal death than women in the south of the country. Given that the primary aim of the Millennium Development Goals is to reduce poverty and the consequences of poverty, celebration is perhaps not yet in order. However, countries where improvements have clearly taken place, such as Rwanda and Cambodia, as shown in other RHM papers, certainly deserve credit for enormous efforts.