Recognizing Abortion Providers as Human Rights Defenders
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01.14.09 - Human Rights defenders are the activists, including journalists, lawyers, judges, and healthcare providers, whose work allows others to exercise their human rights.
Defenders play a critical role in ensuring that human rights enshrined in international human rights treaties translate into meaningful rights at the national level. Unfortunately, these courageous individuals are frequently targeted by public officials and social, cultural, or religious actors opposed to altering the status quo. In recognition of the importance of the role of human rights defenders worldwide and to draw attention to the risks and vulnerabilities they face, the U.N. General Assembly in 1999 unanimously adopted the Declaration on Human Rights Defenders, which urges governments to ensure the protection of human rights defenders. A U.N. Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders works with governments to promote enforcement of the Declaration at the national level. The Special Rapporteur also works with the Inter-American, European, and African human rights systems to strengthen protections for human rights defenders at the regional level.
Women's rights defenders are often targeted in different ways and for different reasons than other human rights defenders. Some defenders—both men and women—face heightened risk because of their work defending women's rights, which often calls for changes to laws and institutions that discriminate against women. Other women's rights defenders are targeted because they are women, making them more vulnerable to specific forms of attack such as sexual violence. In either case, the special risks and vulnerabilities faced by women’s rights defenders require states to take extra measures to ensure their rights.
Reproductive healthcare providers and advocates are women's rights defenders because they seek to ensure that women can exercise their human rights to reproductive health and reproductive autonomy. The Center is working to draw attention to the important role that abortion providers play in defending women's reproductive rights, and to the ways in which abortion providers in the United States are targeted for their work. Ever since the Supreme Court recognized the constitutional right to an abortion in its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, U.S. abortion providers have endured harassment, intimidation, and violence by abortion opponents. Meanwhile, states have passed laws that subject abortion providers to numerous restrictions not imposed on healthcare professionals offering comparable services. These restrictions, the vast majority of which are both unnecessary and unrelated to the goal of promoting patients' health, impose criminal penalties or other severe sanctions on providers if they fail to comply. As a result, abortion providers in the U.S. are forced to work under circumstances far more dangerous, costly, and legally burdensome than every other kind of healthcare provider.
As part of a multi-pronged defense of abortion providers, the Center uses human rights law and strategies to advance recognition of abortion providers as women's rights defenders in the United States and around the world.
Center's communication to the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders regarding the situation of abortion providers in the United States>
Center's testimony before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights at a hearing on Women’s Human Rights Defenders>
