Human rights teams urge U.N. to guard abortion rights within the U.S.
It comes after the Supreme Court ruling final 12 months, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, struck down reproductive protections enshrined within the 1973 Roe v. Wade choice, igniting a seismic social and authorized change within the nation by shifting energy to control abortions into the arms of particular person states. A majority of justices argued that Roe v. Wade’s reasoning was “weak” and that the problem of abortion must be thought-about by “the people’s elected representatives,” in a call that was a long-sought triumph for conservatives.
At least a dozen states have moved to ban or closely limit abortions since Dobbs.
The 196 signatories to Thursday’s letter describe “intensifying harms” occurring within the United States because of the authorized ruling.
It says roughly 22 million ladies and women of reproductive age within the United States reside in states the place “abortion access is heavily restricted, and often totally inaccessible,” inflicting them to face a plethora of public well being harms.
“By overturning the established constitutional protection for access to abortion and through the passage of state laws, the US is in violation of its obligations under international human rights law,” it says, detailing violations to the appropriate to life, well being and privateness, amongst others.
U.N. human rights our bodies have beforehand spoken out in opposition to final 12 months’s ruling, calling it a “major setback” and a “huge blow to women’s human rights and gender equality.”
However, the signatories in Thursday’s letter known as on U.N. mandate holders to do extra “to take up their calls to action” and lift the problem at a excessive stage, together with by “communicating with the US regarding the human rights violations, requesting a visit to the US, convening a virtual stakeholder meeting with US civil society, calls for the US to comply with its obligations under international law, and calls for private companies to take a number of actions to protect reproductive rights.”
“We sent this letter to draw the world’s attention to the suffering that US abortion law is inflicting on women, girls and others who can become pregnant,” Christine Ryan, authorized director of the Global Justice Center, which makes use of worldwide regulation to advocate for gender equality, mentioned in an emailed assertion.
“There is a staggering level of cognitive dissonance required for the United States to claim a role as a global champion of human rights when millions of its own citizens are living under an extremist anti-abortion” insurance policies, she added.
The letter argued that minorities and people who earn low incomes had been notably impacted by the ruling.
“Dobbs is devastating for all people who can become pregnant, but it has had and will have an outsize impact on certain marginalized groups who already face documented discrimination within and outside the health care system,” it mentioned. “These groups often have poorer health outcomes compared to other populations, and Dobbs will worsen these.”
Abortion is ready to be a key election problem in 2024, with a blended image throughout the United States.
Last month at the least 21 governors supporting abortion rights shaped a brand new coalition — the Reproductive Freedom Alliance — initiated by California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D). The group describes itself as nonpartisan — though the alliance to this point solely contains Democratic governors — and goals to broaden and shield entry to abortion and permit for extra collaboration throughout states.
The missive additionally comes as rights teams await a call in a Texas federal court docket difficult Americans’ entry to the federally accepted abortion drug, mifepristone. Access to abortion tablets is seen as one of many subsequent main battlegrounds within the nationwide debate over reproductive rights, and the choice might have sweeping implications for abortion entry throughout the nation, together with in Democratic-led states the place abortion rights are protected.
Vice President Harris lately criticized efforts to limit entry to the abortion tablets as an assault by “extremists” on elementary rights to well being care and indicated that the Biden administration would defend ladies’s proper to abortion medicine.
Amnesty International has mentioned that criminalizing abortions doesn’t cease them, with an estimated 25 million unsafe abortions happening globally annually.
Last summer season, the U.N. ladies’s rights committee additionally known as out the United States on the worldwide stage and “expressed solidarity with women and girls in the United States” urging it to stick to the worldwide conference often called CEDAW, which the United States helped to draft and signed in 1980 however by no means ratified, becoming a member of nations equivalent to Iran, Somalia and Tonga.