June 08, 2012
REUTERS
PESHAWAR - A bomb exploded on a bus on the outskirts of the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar on Friday, killing at least 19 people, police officials told Reuters. (DEVELOPING...)
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REUTERS
PESHAWAR - A bomb exploded on a bus on the outskirts of the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar on Friday, killing at least 19 people, police officials told Reuters. (DEVELOPING...)
As the Supreme Court decides to overturn the 1973 decision that guaranteed abortion rights, many fear an imminent threat to abortion rights in the U.S. But in other countries, the global fight for sexual and reproductive rights is going in different directions.
"Don't abort my right" At 2019 pro-choice march In Toulouse, France.
PARIS — Nearly 50 years after it ensured the right to abortion to Americans, the United States Supreme Court overturned the Roe v. Wade case, meaning that millions of women in the U.S. may lose their constitutional right to abortion.
The groundbreaking decision is likely to set off a range of restrictions on abortion access in multiple states in the U.S., half of which are expected to implement new bans on the procedure. Thirteen have already passed "trigger laws" that will automatically make abortion illegal.
U.S. President Joe Biden called the ruling "a tragic error" and urged individual states to enact laws to allow the procedure.
In a country divided on such a polarizing topic, the decision is likely to cause major shifts in American law and undoubtedly spark outrage among the country’s pro-choice groups. Yet the impact of such a momentous shift, like others in the United States, is also likely to reverberate around the world — and perhaps, eventually, back again in the 50 States.
Roe v. Wade cemented abortion access at a time when most other countries still had longstanding restrictions. Over time, dozens of countries have followed suit. But now, the Supreme Court appears to have put the U.S. against the tide of history.
Latin American countries, traditionally driven by Catholic Church teachings, have moved to liberalize the procedure amidst widespread public pressure from pro-choice movements.
Colombia’s decision in February to decriminalize abortion after 24 weeks was considered the spearhead for other Latin American countries, including Chile which, barely a month later, passed an article guaranteeing sexual and reproductive rights as fundamental and therefore protected by the state.
Still, other countries are tightening long-held restrictions, notably Poland, which last year passed a new law that banned abortion in virtually all cases.
Access to abortion is one of those issues — like marriage rights and assisted suicide — that is bound to be universal for the very fact that it is so personal.
Close to one-third of women and girls in Europe face challenges in accessing abortion care, according to the European Abortion Politics Atlas. While 21 European countries treat abortion like any other medical service, 16 regulate it through their legal codes, allowing restrictions to be placed on the procedure. Further, in 31 European nations abortion procedures are not covered as part of their national health plan, often making it a financial burden for those who are low income, like undocumented immigrants, Roma people and sex workers.
Much of the continent is marked by stark contrasts in access: Residents of the microstate of San Marino voted overwhelmingly last month to legalize abortion. But Malta, which is also majority Catholic abortion has been criminalized since the 1800s, and remains the last European Union country with a total ban. A proposed bill to decriminalize the procedure was blocked earlier this year.
Currently 26 European countries allow healthcare workers to deny abortions based on their personal beliefs, which is a particular issue in Spain: The country liberalized its abortion laws in 2010, allowing abortions up to 14 weeks in any public hospital. But an abundance of so-called "conscientious objectors" means that many wanting to end pregnancies are forced to travel to find a provider, often resorting to private clinics. El Pais reports that only 6.2% of abortions are done in public hospitals. Despite legislative attempts to curb these conscientious objectors, doctors refusing to perform abortions are also on the rise in countries like Italy and Argentina.
Polish doctors who conduct abortions face up to a three-year prison sentence.
In June, the European Parliament called on member countries to ensure "high quality, comprehensive and accessible sexual and reproductive health and rights." Some Western European countries have aimed to broaden access, like France now providing free contraception to women up to age 25. But the EU ruling also raises questions around rule of law for some member states.
For example, Poland instituted a near total abortion ban earlier this year except in cases of endangerment to the woman's health. This is part of a shift toward more conservative legislature that has also targeted LGTBTQ rights in the name of "pro-family" resolutions. Now, Polish doctors who conduct abortions could be given up to a three-year prison sentence. Countries with more progressive abortion stances have stepped up in response, most notably Belgium, which is funding cross-border abortions for Polish women.
While China has long been known for its family planning through its One-Child Policy to limit population growth, recent efforts to reduce abortions are raising concerns. In September, the State Council, China's cabinet, announced its intention to curb "medically unnecessary" abortions, but with few details on how this would be achieved. The plan also included increased access to birth control.
While the government issued a similar proposal in 2011, some are more concerned now given increased government intervention in promoting childbirth amidst an aging population. The country's population growth has slowed for close to 30 years now, with the over 60 population increasing from 13.3% in 2010 to 18.7% by 2010.
Whether through being forced to end a pregnancy or carry one to term, some Chinese women feel like they have little control over their bodies. As Yaqiu Wang, a China researcher at Human Rights Watch, told the Sydney Morning Herald, "Today, many across the country still painfully feel the trauma of forced abortion. And now, without government acknowledgment or accountability, Beijing is doing a potentially abusive about-face. What hasn't changed is that China's government still treats women's bodies as tools for its economic development goals."
Since the 1973 decision to grant women the right to access a legal abortion, the subject has been a hot-button issue for the Supreme Court and the country as a whole. In December 2021, the top court indicated a desire to undo federal law, granting individual state legislature the power to determine the legality of abortions in their jurisdiction.
With Roe v. Wade now overturned, bill proposals already drafted by lawmakers in over two dozen conservative U.S. states, effectively banning abortion, could quickly go into effect.
With 2022 midterm elections quickly approaching, both Democrats and Republicans are bound to use the decision to encourage voters on each side of the aisle to support their respective parties.
Senator Patty Murray, for example, a Democrat from Washington, has called on voters to protect her party’s majority leadership. She said in a statement, “After ringing these alarms for years now, it’s time to break the glass. We need to fight back with everything we’ve got right now. The right to abortion is on the line, and I’ll never stop fighting to protect it.”
Colombia’s February 2022 decision to decriminalize abortion was welcomed news for pro-choice groups, as historically abortion was only legal when the life or health of the mother is at risk, if the fetus has malformations that make it nonviable or when the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest.
Although abortion after 24-weeks will remain illegal in the country, after two decades of campaigning for legal abortion, pro-choice groups see this as a win.
Mariana Ardila, an attorney for Women's Link Worldwide, and an advocate for reproductive rights said, "We knew this was not an easy fight, but at some point it had to happen. Of course, while we were hoping for full decriminalization, and we will keep fighting for it, this is an important step forward for us.”
Latin America has some of the world's strictest abortion laws, partially because of the influence of the Catholic Church. But this might be changing, with large-scale protests by feminist groups and now Colombia’s decision influencing the policies of legislatures across the region.
Last year, thousands marched as part of the September 28 International Safe Abortion Day, which began in 1990 as an event promoting the decriminalization of abortion in Latin America and the Caribbean.
A shift that clearly is having ripple effects.
Some of the most pressing actions took place in El Salvador, which still has a total abortion ban, with penalties ranging from two to 50 years in prison. In this Central American country, women have even been imprisoned for stillbirths and miscarriages. But some who have been prosecuted are fighting back, even bringing in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to challenge the ban. In this case, the woman, Manuela, was sentenced to 30 years in prison after falling and having a stillbirth in 2008.
In contrast, abortion access has increased in Argentina, which in 2020 legalized abortions for up to 14 weeks; previously, abortions came with up to 15-year prison sentences except in cases of rape and medical necessity.
Mexico's Supreme Court also delivered a landmark decision in September when the majority of judges voted to decriminalize abortions. Women around Mexico held up green bandanas — an abortion rights symbol that began in Argentina — to honor a shift that clearly is having ripple effects in their country and beyond.Close to 80% of women in the Middle East, North Africa region have restricted access to abortion. Sites like Women on Web help facilitate sending abortion pills to areas where they are difficult or impossible to acquire, but these platforms have been banned in Saudi Arabia, where abortions are authorized only in rare circumstances.
Tunisia and Turkey are the only two MENA countries that allow elective abortions; most governments in the region only permit them when they are medically necessary. Even in circumstances where abortion is legal, many seeking to end pregnancies deal with strong social stigma in these majority Muslim nations.
Turkish women have described the situation as a "de facto" abortion ban under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and many are forced to turn to illegal clinics with questionable health practices. In Tunisia, abortion has been legal since 1973, but women must overcome societal outcasting as well as economic and structural hurdles in terminating pregnancies.
While the Arab Spring focused specifically on achieving equal rights for women, the reality is many still face inequitable treatment, including for reproductive health care. Unwed mothers who keep their babies are often seen as social outcasts, creating a terrible Catch-22 for many.
[Updated on June 24, 2022]
As the Supreme Court decides to overturn the 1973 decision that guaranteed abortion rights, many fear an imminent threat to abortion rights in the U.S. But in other countries, the global fight for sexual and reproductive rights is going in different directions.
As successor to Angela Merkel, Olaf Scholz is facing a wealth of challenges at home and abroad. In the coming days, he faces key international summits while a domestic energy crisis begins to spiral. Is the new Chancellor up to the challenge?
U.S. politics around gun control can be confusing to Americans but outright bewildering to foreigners living there. For Azahara Palomeque, a Spaniard who just left the U.S. after 12 years, the country is governed by a "necropolitics" that doesn't value life.
Central to the tragic absurdity of this war is the question of language. Vladimir Putin has repeated that protecting ethnic Russians and the Russian-speaking populations of Ukraine was a driving motivation for his invasion.
Yet one month on, a quick look at the map shows that many of the worst-hit cities are those where Russian is the predominant language: Kharkiv, Odesa, Kherson.
Then there is Mariupol, under siege and symbol of Putin’s cruelty. In the largest city on the Azov Sea, with a population of half a million people, Ukrainians make up slightly less than half of the city's population, and Mariupol's second-largest national ethnicity is Russians. As of 2001, when the last census was conducted, 89.5% of the city's population identified Russian as their mother tongue.
Between 2018 and 2019, I spent several months in Mariupol. It is a rugged but beautiful city dotted with Soviet-era architecture, featuring wide avenues and hillside parks, and an extensive industrial zone stretching along the shoreline. There was a vibrant youth culture and art scene, with students developing projects to turn their city into a regional cultural center with an international photography festival.
There were also many offices of international NGOs and human rights organizations, a consequence of the fact that Mariupol was the last major city before entering the occupied zone of Donbas. Many natives of the contested regions of Luhansk and Donetsk had moved there, taking jobs in restaurants and hospitals. I had fond memories of the welcoming from locals who were quicker to smile than in some other parts of Ukraine. All of this is gone.
Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
According to the latest data from the local authorities, 80% of the port city has been destroyed by Russian bombs, artillery fire and missile attacks, with particularly egregious targeting of civilians, including a maternity hospital, a theater where more than 1,000 people had taken shelter and a school where some 400 others were hiding.
The official civilian death toll of Mariupol is estimated at more than 3,000. There are no language or ethnic-based statistics of the victims, but it’s likely the majority were Russian speakers.
So let’s be clear, Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
Putin’s Public Enemy No. 1, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, is a mother-tongue Russian speaker who’d made a successful acting and comedy career in Russian-language broadcasting, having extensively toured Russian cities for years.
Rescuers carry a person injured during a shelling by Russian troops of Kharkiv, northeastern Ukraine.
Yes, the official language of Ukraine is Ukrainian, and a 2019 law aimed to ensure that it is used in public discourse, but no one has ever sought to abolish the Russian language in everyday life. In none of the cities that are now being bombed by the Russian army to supposedly liberate them has the Russian language been suppressed or have the Russian-speaking population been discriminated against.
Sociologist Mikhail Mishchenko explains that studies have found that the vast majority of Ukrainians don’t consider language a political issue. For reasons of history, culture and the similarities of the two languages, Ukraine is effectively a bilingual nation.
"The overwhelming majority of the population speaks both languages, Russian and Ukrainian,” Mishchenko explains. “Those who say they understand Russian poorly and have difficulty communicating in it are just over 4% percent. Approximately the same number of people say the same about Ukrainian.”
In general, there is no problem of communication and understanding. Often there will be conversations where one person speaks Ukrainian, and the other responds in Russian. Geographically, the Russian language is more dominant in the eastern and central parts of Ukraine, and Ukrainian in the west.
Like most central Ukrainians I am perfectly bilingual: for me, Ukrainian and Russian are both native languages that I have used since childhood in Kyiv. My generation grew up on Russian rock, post-Soviet cinema, and translations of foreign literature into Russian. I communicate in Russian with my sister, and with my mother and daughter in Ukrainian. I write professionally in three languages: Ukrainian, Russian and English, and can also speak Polish, French, and a bit Japanese. My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
At the same time, I am not Russian — nor British or Polish. I am Ukrainian. Ours is a nation with a long history and culture of its own, which has always included a multi-ethnic population: Russians, Belarusians, Moldovans, Crimean Tatars, Bulgarians, Romanians, Hungarians, Poles, Jews, Greeks. We all, they all, have found our place on Ukrainian soil. We speak different languages, pray in different churches, we have different traditions, clothes, and cuisine.
My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
Like in other countries, these differences have been the source of conflict in our past. But it is who we are and will always be, and real progress has been made over the past three decades to embrace our multitudes. Our Jewish, Russian-speaking president is the most visible proof of that — and is in fact part of what our soldiers are fighting for.
Many in Moscow were convinced that Russian troops would be welcomed in Ukraine as liberating heroes by Russian speakers. Instead, young soldiers are forced to shoot at people who scream in their native language.
Starving people ina street of Kharkiv in 1933, during the famine
Diocesan Archive of Vienna (Diözesanarchiv Wien)/BA Innitzer
Putin has tried to rally the troops by warning that in Ukraine a “genocide” of ethnic Russians is being carried out by a government that must be “de-nazified.”
These are, of course, words with specific definitions that carry the full weight of history. The Ukrainian people know what genocide is not from books. In my hometown of Kyiv, German soldiers massacred Jews en masse. My grandfather survived the Buchenwald concentration camp, liberated by the U.S. army. My great-grandmother, who died at the age of 95, survived the 1932-33 famine when the Red Army carried out the genocide of the Ukrainian middle class, and her sister disappeared in the camps of Siberia, convicted for defying rationing to try to feed her children during the famine.
On Tuesday, came a notable report of one of the latest civilian deaths in the besieged Russian-speaking city of Kharkiv: a 96-year-old had been killed when shelling hit his apartment building. The victim’s name was Boris Romanchenko; he had survived Buchenwald and two other Nazi concentration camps during World War II. As President Zelensky noted: Hitler didn’t manage to kill him, but Putin did.
Genocide has returned to Ukraine, from Kharkiv to Kherson to Mariupol, as Vladimir Putin had warned. But it is his own genocide against the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine.