Front Page Features Archive

2011: A Look Back

Every year, anti-choice state legislators propose hundreds of measures intended to erode women’s rights to abortion and reproductive health care. Some of these aim to restrict access by imposing mandatory waiting periods, ideologically biased counseling provisions, and other burdensome, unnecessary requirements. Other proposals are far more extreme, including those designed to ban abortion or prohibit women from accessing contraception.

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Reproductive Rights Violations—Torture By Any Other Name

A woman living with HIV in Chile is forcibly sterilized while unconscious and undergoing a cesarean delivery.

A Kenyan woman, along with her newborn child, is detained for weeks by hospital staff in miserable conditions. Her crime is poverty; she has no money to pay her medical bill…

Mapping Progress—and the Challenges Ahead—in Abortion Law Reform

For nearly 20 years, the Center for Reproductive Rights has stood up for women around the globe, winning landmark victories that secure vital protections of women's inalienable human rights to health, dignity, equality, and full reproductive autonomy.

Launch our new interactive map of the world's abortion laws >

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Human Rights Day 2011

“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”

That’s the first sentence of Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations 63 years ago on December 10.

And yet here we are, all these decades later, still fighting tooth and nail to ensure that those 12 words apply to all women…

World AIDS Day

When doctors in India found out that Gita Bai was HIV-positive, they denied her pre-natal care. She soon returned to the hospital when contractions started—and the doctors physically barred her from entering the building. …

International Women’s Human Rights Defenders Day

For the women and men who provide reproductive health services and fight for women's rights to the full range of reproductive healthcare, every day comes with not just the challenge of doing incredibly important work but also the weight of facing an opposition that is hostile,…

International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women

Thirty years ago, women’s rights activists first marked November 25 as the day on which the world would demand an end to all physical and sexual abuse targeted at women…

The UN Speaks Out: Women Must Have the Right to Health, the Right to Decide

Last week, the General Assembly of the United Nations heard a blunt, emphatic message: No longer should the world tolerate the tragic, avoidable deaths of tens of thousands of women forced to seek out unsafe, illegal abortions every year…

Peru: The Long March to Justice

Six years ago this week, the Center for Reproductive Rights won a groundbreaking victory for the women of Peru and around the world . For the first time, an international human rights body condemned a country for failing to provide abortion services that were both legal and essential to the health of a woman, violating her fundamental human rights in the process.

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Human Rights Council Adopts Groundbreaking Resolution on Maternal Mortality

For the third year running, the UN's Human Rights Council has focused its attention on the global problem of preventable maternal mortality and morbidity. A ground-breaking resolution was adopted yesterday, in which States reaffirm their commitment to addressing the root causes of preventable maternal deaths and disability…