United Nations is urged to take action in US abortion crisis
ALMOST 200 human rights organisations from across the world have issued an “urgent appeal” to the UN to intervene to ensure the US protects reproductive rights – after a Supreme Court ruling last year overturned the constitutional right to an abortion.
In a letter issued yesterday, nonprofits and civil society groups including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the Global Justice Center, as well as dozens of smaller US-based charities warned that “people residing in the US who can become pregnant are facing a human rights crisis”.
It comes after the Supreme Court ruling last year, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, struck down reproductive protections enshrined in the 1973 Roe vs Wade decision, igniting a seismic social and legal change in the country by shifting power to regulate abortions into the hands of individual states. A majority of justices argued that Roe vs Wade’s reasoning was “weak” and that the issue of abortion should be considered by “the people’s elected representatives,” in a decision that was a long-sought triumph for conservatives.
At least a dozen states have moved to ban or heavily restrict abortions since Dobbs.
The 196 signatories yesterday’s letter describe “intensifying harms” occurring in the US as a result of the legal ruling. It says about 22 million women and girls of reproductive age in the US are living in states where “abortion access is heavily restricted, and often totally inaccessible,” causing them to face a plethora of public health harms.
The signatories in the letter called on UN mandate holders to do more “to take up their calls to action” and raise the issue at a high level, including 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, legal director of the Global Justice Center, which uses international law to advocate for gender equality, said in an emailed statement.
“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” policies, she added.
The letter argued that minorities and those who earn low incomes had been particularly 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 said.