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.

Race, Reproductive Politics and Reproductive Health Care in the Contemporary United States

This editorial from the journal Contraception offers an important analysis of population and family planning policy in the USA, both in the context of current politics and also from history, starting as far back as 100 years ago.

Carole Joffe, Willie J. Parker

From: Contraception [Editorial] July 2012 reprinted as a blog with kind permission of Carole Joffe

To paraphrase Leo Tolstoy, who famously wrote that all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way, we can say that all nations confront the thorny issue of demographics, but each in its own, typically controversial, way. Various European countries, for example, have anxieties about a “demographic winter,” which is a below replacement birth rate of the native population, which has led to corresponding fears about rising birth rates among Muslim immigrants. China, driven by worries about overpopulation, has instituted coercive reproductive policies that many observers find unacceptably harsh. The United States, a country marked by extreme stratification on both racial and economic grounds, is a particularly interesting case to consider from a demographic lens because there has been a history both of targeting the birth rates of people of color and at the same time deep political divisions about the provision of reproductive health services — particularly abortion but increasingly, as the current election season reveals, contraception as well.

We, a sociologist and physician, respectively, write here of our dismay about the contemporary state of reproductive politics in the United States and particularly the cynical manipulation of racial themes by the opponents of abortion and birth control. However, we are acutely aware of the mixed legacy of the United States with respect to demographic issues. To name but a few examples, in 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt warned of “race suicide” because of his concern about falling birth rates among white Anglo-Saxon women and the higher rates among immigrants.1 In the 1927 Supreme Court case, Buck v Bell, the Court upheld a statute instituting compulsory sterilization of the unfit, including the mentally retarded, “for the protection and health of the state”.2 In the 1960s, impoverished African-American and Latina women, along with some poor whites, were subjected to coerced sterilizations, often without these women fully understanding to what they had ostensibly agreed.3 When the first federally funded family planning centers were established in the early 1970s, as a result of the passage of Title X, they were disproportionately located in African-American communities, although the language of the legislation did not mention race but rather the income status of the intended recipients.4

Co-existing with these events, however, has been a longstanding reproductive freedom movement in the United States, made up of clinicians and lay activists alike. Starting in the early 20th century, doctors and nurses, along with lay allies, fought for the legalization of first, birth control, and, later, abortion, seeing the particular damage done to the most vulnerable women in the absence of such services. In the 1960s and 1970s, feminist health activists raised an outcry about the sterilization abuses mentioned above; indeed, among the most prominent of the reproductive rights organizations to emerge from the “second wave” feminism of that era was CARASA, the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse, providing a template for the principle that abortion rights should ideally be considered in a broader context that includes the right to have children.5 That generation of feminist activists also severely criticized the then-common practice of testing new contraceptive methods on Third World women. Today, there are numerous reproductive rights/reproductive justice groups hard at work in the United States, a number of them specifically concerned with the situation of women of color.

In short, this very brief recapitulation of reproductive struggles in the United States reveals the truism that the world of sexual and reproductive health services is a complex terrain, always containing both liberatory and coercive possibilities, and always with particular implications for people of color in a white-dominated society. But with respect to present-day conflicts, no figure’s legacy has been more contested than that of Margaret Sanger, the founder of the organization that eventually became Planned Parenthood. Anti-abortion forces for years have accused Sanger of being a racist and a eugenicist. Currently, these groups have pounced upon the high rate of abortion within the African-American community — black women have abortions at nearly four times the rate of white women — and have joined forces with some conservative groups within that community to mount a vigorous campaign against Planned Parenthood in particular and abortion provision more generally. Starting in Atlanta, and spreading to other cities, these groups have sponsored controversial billboards — some proclaiming that “black children are an endangered species” and others comparing abortion to slavery.

As Ellen Chesler, Sanger’s premier biographer, has argued, such accusations are a distortion of Sanger’s record.6 Although Sanger did receive some support from eugenicist organizations (at a time when eugenics was a far more mainstream movement than it is currently), her record cannot be construed as “racist.” Among her supporters were numerous black ministers, leading African-American intellectuals such as W.E.B. Dubois, and prominent community leaders such as Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of the National Council for Negro Women. In 1966, when Dr. Martin Luther King accepted the first Margaret Sanger award from Planned Parenthood, he praised Sanger for “her courage and vision,” comparing her struggle for birth control to the civil rights movement. One of the most effective critiques of the billboard campaign, and against the larger agenda of demonizing Planned Parenthood, has come from Sistersong, a coalition of reproductive justice groups of women of color. As Loretta Ross, the executive director of the group told the New York Times, “The reason we have so many Planned Parenthoods in the black community is because leaders in the black community in the ‘20s and ’30s went to Margaret Sanger and asked for them. Controlling our fertility was part of our uplift out of poverty strategy, and it still works”.7

This manipulation of the history of race and reproduction by those involved in the billboard campaigns and similar efforts obscures the contemporary facts of life faced by the most vulnerable black women. These women experience high rates of unintended pregnancy, low use of the most effective forms of contraception, deep poverty, inadequate educational opportunities, unacceptable levels of intimate partner violence and, very often, lack of support from their churches. It should come as no surprise that these same women would have the highest rates of abortion in this country. Given the conditions, these women need — among many other services — access to comprehensive health care that includes both family planning and abortion. Yet, abortion has long been excluded from most mainstream health care institutions and sources of public funding, and during the current political season, we have watched with dismay the severe attacks on contraceptive coverage as well. The isolation of abortion, in particular, from the rest of health care has contributed to its stigmatization and has helped the development of conspiracy theories, such as we see in the billboard campaign. We decry the inflammatory, false rhetoric of “black genocide” that has been used in this campaign by anti-abortion extremists, and we are hardly the first to point to the hypocrisy of those who oppose contraception and abortion, yet just as fervently oppose any spending for social services.

One of us (WP), speaking from my perspective as a member of the African American community and as a women’s health provider, asserts that this attempt to manipulate my community is made possible by our unresolved issues regarding gender roles and sexuality in a modern context. The failure of our community to promote the agency of our mothers, sisters and partners, and to deal forthrightly with sexual matters, leaves us treating abortion and HIV-related issues as “open secrets.” This evasion results in exorbitant rates for both. To truly confront these issues, our community desperately needs medically accurate sexuality education, improved health literacy and a constructive engagement of religious and spiritual leaders, given the central importance of religion in the African-American community. This type of empowerment effort towards shared reproductive health responsibility is the only effective rebuttal to the mischief occurring with race and reproduction in our community. To paraphrase Dr. King, just as individual wealth is always a function of the commonwealth, thus it too holds true that compromising the reproductive health and rights of individual black women results in jeopardizing the collective well-being of black communities.

If to know is to become responsible, my awareness of black women’s unmet reproductive health needs requires me to provide family planning and abortion care to those most in demand for them. Doing so represents a dual sense of responsibility that I feel as both a women’s health provider and as a member of the African-American community. I join with those in my community who have articulated a vision of reproductive justice, defined as creating a society that enables all women and families to have the children they want, the resources needed to raise them, and the ability to prevent or end the pregnancies that they do not want. I call on my fellow health care providers, of all races, to trust women to make the good and tough decisions about when and whether to expand their families. A fundamental respect for fairness necessitates it, and a respect for human rights demands it.

In conclusion, as already noted, we write in a period of unprecedented political attack on women’s health issues — not just abortion, but also contraception and a range of other reproductive health services. Even the seemingly long settled issue of the importance of programs to combat domestic violence is now being resisted by conservative forces.8 This “war on women,” as it has come to be known, has galvanized a countermovement of health activists, both women and men, who have effectively and creatively protested these developments in a variety of ways. We are greatly heartened by this mobilization, although its eventual impact on elections and restrictive measures is unclear at this time. We close by reminding our readers of what is perhaps obvious: the stakes in this “war” are inevitably the highest for the most vulnerable in our society — those poor women of color about whom we have written in this editorial.

Carole Joffe
Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health
Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health
University of California, San Francisco
Oakland, CA

Willie J. Parker
Board member
Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health
New York, NY

1. Roosevelt T. On American Motherhood. Available at http://www.nationalcenter.org/TRooseveltMotherhood.html (accessed July 20, 2012).
2. Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927). Available at http://www.oyez.org/cases/1901-1939/1926/1926_292 (accessed July 20, 2012)
3. Schoen J. Choice and coercion: birth control, sterilization, and abortion in public health and welfare. Chapel Hill: University of N. Carolina Press; 2005;
4. Gordon L. In: The moral property of women: a history of birth control politics in America. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press; 2002;p. 289–291
5. Petchesky R. In: Abortion and woman’s choice: the state, sexuality and reproductive freedom. Boston: Northeastern University Press; 1990;p. 392
6. Chesler E. Was Planned Parenthood’s founder racist?. Salon. 2012;Nov 2. Available at http://www.salon.com/writer/ellen_chesler/(accessed July 20, 2012).
7. Dewans S. Antiabortion ads split Atlanta. New York Times. 2012;Feb 5. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/06/us/06abortion.html?scp=1&sq=Shaila%20Dewan%20Margaret%20Sanger&st=cse (accessed July 20, 2012).
8. Joffe C. All common ground lost: the right’s opposition to the Violence Against Women Act. Rhrealitycheck.org. Available at http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/article/2012/03/16/all-common-ground-lost-rights-opposition-to-violence-against-women-act (accessed July 20, 2012).