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If you want to decrease the number of women who seek induced abortions each year, then you should promote the decriminalization of abortion laws in countries where the procedure is illegal and encourage increased access to comprehensive contraceptive choices. Abortion is a highly controversial subject and I am not here to make an argument either way about how the issue relates to religion, when life begins or the other common morality debates that arise when the topic is discussed. Instead, I’ll just present a few facts and what those facts mean to me.
Just because abortion is illegal in a country doesn’t mean that abortions are not performed there. While some may find this paradoxical abortion rates are similar, if not higher, in countries where the procedure is illegal. For example, abortion is prohibited almost entirely in the majority of countries in South America, yet the average abortion rate is 31 per 1000 women on the continent, and only 21 per 1000 in North America (excluding Mexico). Countries like Peru and Uganda – where abortion is prohibited – have abortion rates six times those of Germany and the Netherlands, where abortion is legal and readily accessible.
The medical risk of an abortion varies greatly between regions where the procedure is legal and where it is illegal. Guttmacher Institute estimates that each year 67,000 women die and five million women are hospitalized due to complications of unsafe abortions. On the other hand, the risk of dying from a safe and early abortion is actually significantly less than the chance of dying from pregnancy and childbirth.
Prohibiting access to proper medical care and services is a violation of inherent human rights. Women will seek out abortions whether the law allows them to or not, and when they do society must protect those women by allowing them to obtain safe procedures.
The key to preventing abortions is reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies and giving people contraceptive choices so that they can limit or space pregnancies. The general rule is, as you increase access to contraceptives, abortion rates go down. After the fall of the Soviet Union, former Soviet Union countries were able to obtain a wide range of contraceptive options that were not available before. As a result, the abortion rates in Eastern Europe have decreased by half since 1995.
I think both sides of the abortion argument can agree that the goal should be to reduce the total number of abortions performed each year. We need to make sure that the means to this end protect the lives and health of women and girls everywhere.
This post was compiled from a number of blogs from the international youth climate movement and edited by Casie Reed. It was originally published at sustainus.org/blog.
I have to say, I’m pretty disgusted with many of the developed countries speaking. They are more than willing to talk about progress and how much they care – and then block text necessary for the survival of entire countries. Countries are essentially trying to decide if the most vulnerable countries are worth saving at this point. For some countries, such as Australia, Canada, Japan, and the US, Christmas bonuses for multi-millionaires and bailing large corporations out of debt seem to be more important.
As one minister from a small island put it this morning, we are talking about mass murder here. Mass murder of nations, peoples, and cultures. Again, as another minister put it, we are asking small island states to sign onto a suicide pact with the way negotiations are currently proceeding. I don’t know about you, but I’m going to put everything I have into reshaping the political landscape over the next year so that we leave no one behind in this process. Survival is non-negotiable.
Negotiations are moving slow here, which is bad. We have less than a year at this point to get an incredibly strong international climate agreement -
Youth Demonstrate in Support of the Survival of All Countries and Peoples
that is not a very long time. Especially with the level of ambition many developed countries have. But there is hope!
As negotiators hide behind technicalities and acronyms, youth are uniting around a strong shared vision for an equitable climate treaty. We need to make sure Poznan and the year leading up to Copenhagen are both successful. We need leadership and a commitment by parties to the survival of all countries and peoples.
Yesterday, international youth launched a new campaign – the Survival Campaign. The international youth delegation is asking all countries to commit to ’safeguard the future of all countries and peoples’. Committing countries to negotiating based on this principle means they have to do more, faster. That would mean, for example, taking responsibility to prevent small island nations, sovereign under the UN process but weak politically and economically, from slipping beneath the waves.
This is especially important for developed countries who must reduce emissions at least 40% by 2020 compared to 1990, with an overall global goal of reducing CO2-e concentrations below 350ppm. Developed countries must also massively increase financial and technological support for both adaptation and mitigation to help achieve this global goal in an equitable manner. Young people have laid out a clear challenge to these countries: take immediate action to safeguard the survival of all countries and peoples.
To ensure the principle is formalized we are meeting with a number of countries and asking them to support our message. We are asking countries to support this text:
I, the undersigned, commit my delegation to a global climate treaty that: safeguards the survival of all countries and peoples.
Climate change threatens the very survival of island nations and other impacted communities.
Join international youth to ensure that a global climate treaty includes the principle of safeguarding the survival of all countries and peoples.
We need a successful outcome from Poznan. Reassure the world you are committed to a climate agreement that protects the most vulnerable among us.
Ninety countries (and counting!) have committed. We also printed out placards that read “Survival” on one side and “safeguards the future for all countries and peoples” on the other for delegates to have with them at their tables during the ministerial high level segment. Unfortunately the UNFCCC doesn’t allow delegates to have unapproved things on their tables, so security took some away.
Youth Demonstrate in Support of the Survival of All Countries and Peoples
Despite this, Uganda, Sweden, and Iceland placed the sign prominently in front of them during their speeches. Solomon Islands, Venezuela, Djibouti, Madagascar, Maldives, Costa Rica, and Papa New Guinea also displayed their Solidarity placards next to their own, displaying solidarity in the commitment to the survival of all countries and peoples. While not all countries have signed on (countries like the US, for example), we have received incredible support from almost every delegation.
The youth movement here is absolutely inspirational. That’s the only way to describe it. We are transcending our national boarders and working together for our common future. We are determined to remove the brackets that have been placed around our planet. We are uniting to safeguard the survival of all countries and peoples. We need all of your help. That means telling everybody we know about the issue and doing everything we can in terms of lifestyle, as well as political action, to stop catastrophic climate change.
If we wait any longer, it will be too late. Join us: www.350.org/survival
December 10, 1948, in the aftermath of World War II, world came together to perform a historic act: the unanimous passage of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).
Sixty years later, with the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, the growing “war on terror”, genocide in Sudan, rape in DRC, and nearly half of the world’s 6.7 billion people living on less than $2 a day, Amnesty International reports that the world’s leaders “owe an apology for failing to deliver on the promise of justice and equality.”
As a reminder, Amnesty teamed up with Link TV: Television Without Borders and 16 outspoken musicians to produce a video message called “The Price of Silence,” urging governments to take the 60th anniversary as an opportunity for action not just celebration.
Among the musicians, several have fled oppressive regimes: Yungchen Lhamo escaped a Chinese labor camp in Tibet; Alicia Partnoy survived Argentina’s secret detention camps; Emmanuel Jal was forced to join a Sudanese rebel army when he was just six years old; Chiwoniso recently fled the political and economic unrest of Zimbabwe.
But while most of us are well versed in the civil and political rights set out in the Declaration and know a violation when we see one, the response is quite different when we talk about economic, social, and cultural rights.
For example, the UDHR also proclaims that:
Article 21 “Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.”
Article 23 “Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.”
Article 25 “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.”
Article 26 “Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages.”
Why, then, have we adopted a political and economic model that denies these rights to billions of people?
Irene Khan, the Secretary General of Amnesty International comments:
“We can’t ignore the injustice, the inequality, and the impunity that have become the hallmarks of our time. And we need, at this moment, to think of what are the biggest threats to human rights. To my mind, the biggest threat is the threat that the poor face, that their rights are not being recognized, are not being realized, may never be realized, unless we all see both economic and social rights and civil and political rights with equal importance [...] It is very important that we focus the implementation, making real the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, precisely on those who have been denied its benefit for the last 60 years.”
With Obama poised to take office next month, his transition team is opening up unprecedented opportunities for citizens to take part in shaping a new U.S. domestic, as well as foreign policy. If we care about human rights, it is imperative that civil society act on this opportunity. This 2009, join Americans for Informed Democracy and our partners in telling Barack Obama to uphold his commitment to global development by creating a cabinet level Department of Development, re-writing a development strategy that is founded in the achievement of the MDGs (the one we have now is from 1961!), and reform the rules of trade to reflect our nation’s respect for civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights worldwide.
This is a guest blog post from one of AID’s Regional Coordinators, Ruhi Shamim.
Enjoy!
Once upon a time, I was a Facebook hater. This confession might be hard to swallow, especially for my Facebook friends who probably see my name pop up on their Newsfeed several times a day, as I impetuously change my status message to reflect the nuances of my inner most thoughts of the moment. I began to reevaluate my skepticism about Facebook’s cyber take on a social life and overcome the awkwardness of getting “friend requests” from TAs and uncles, when I realized how I could effectively use Facebook to spread information to my contacts.
Online media tools, like Facebook, are changing activist culture and becoming a key feature of the current progressive, global social movement—one in which youth play a prominent role, especially because of their access to new communication tools. Last week, the first Alliance of Youth Movements Summit took place at Columbia University Law School in New York City. The Summit brought together several grassroots organizers, who shared how they used online tools to create social change. Keynote speakers included David Moskovitz, one of the founders of Facebook, and Oscar Morales, founder of “One Million Voices Against FARC,” who used online platforms to mobilize 12 million people in one month, to take it to the streets and protest against FARC in Colombia.
The Summit was organized by Howcast Media with additional support from Facebook, Google, YouTube, MTV, Columbia Law School, the U.S. Department of State and Access 360 Media. Discussion topics included “Building a Global Movement,” “Rebooting Politics 2.0: A Conversation with the Obama Campaign’s New Media Team,” and “How to Stay Safe: Safety, Law, and Security for the Social Movement.” All videos of the discussions can be found at the Howcast website, (By the way, Howcast is another innovative online tool for spreading awareness because it allows universal access to videos of various conferences and enables students, like me, to observe the conferences without physically being there. Without Howcast, this blog post would not be.)
I was drawn to the discussion titled, “Facebook: Origins and Tools for Social Change ” in which co-founder, David Moskovitz, discussed Facebook’s utility for organizing and mobilizing social networks, its efficacy in spreading information rapidly, as well as Facebook-related concerns over privacy and censorship. I began to think about how I personally have used Facebook as an activist tool and about the risks and benefits of an online activist culture.
Although many people view Facebook as merely a cyber-social hub (A.K.A a waste of time, a distraction that extends library visits by many hours, a forum for our secret “facebook stalker” tendencies), there is no denying that the tightly-connected Facebook community is an incredible resource to spread political information and reach out to people. As Moskovitz put it, “the mission statement of the company is not to help people learn to date and discover new music, it’s to make the world more open and more connected.” That said, I’m interested in how young people actually use Facebook, and what would encourage them to use it for social/political activism instead of as just a way to avoid homework and click through pictures of an acquaintance’s spring break in Mexico.
Facebook has been helpful to a few of my activist endeavors in that I use it to post news stories that highlight the various, interdisciplinary aspects of social justice and environmentalism—two global issues I actively care about. I have created Facebook groups to organize students with common interests that range from arranging a “crunch-time” study group for one of those unfortunate, slumber-laden 9 AM classes, to student leaders interested in transparent coalition building in order to address broader University issues. I have used Facebook to promote my AID Innovators in Cultural Diplomacy project, and as a result have connected over fifty students from over eight schools who can share information with each other about what’s going on at their universities about the cause.
While the networking tools of Facebook certainly are redeeming, I still have a few grievances about how information is controlled and managed over the network. The most important issue that I see is that Facebook users must be well-versed in how the network actually works, so that they can keep track of the information they send out and be aware of who might be accessing it. This issue is both political and personal—keep in mind that many Facebook users are not independent adults—and needs to be further addressed by Facebook.
Now that Facebook has expanded and is available to anyone, Facebook contacts, whether friends, family, or colleagues, can be better managed so information can be spread more effectively. I think that the individual user should be able to send different messages to different types of networks, so that Aunt Bertha can be in one network where she doesn’t necessarily have to see pictures of what you’ve been up to on your Friday nights and so that you can openly share information with contacts within your work network without worrying about colleagues perusing your slightly flirtatious wall-to-walls.
In any case, all of the issues addressed—as well as the questions posed—by the rise of Facebook show that 21st century activist culture is deeply affected by this new communication technology. This technology not only spreads information at the speed of light; it also requires internet users to develop online savviness so they can read information critically and protect their privacy. The technology also allows organizations to keep a more accurate account of size and demographics of their outreach efforts, connects and streamlines individuals for powerful coalition building, and most importantly inspires and engages people to become involved and share their experiences in implementing progressive social change.
