NEW RELEASES!
2007 Annual Report
August 5, 2008-- Last year, the Center continued to work worldwide to secure recognition of reproductive rights as human rights. We won cases that affirmed the right to safe abortion. We challenged laws and policies that blocked women's access to contraception and life-saving emergency obstetric care. We forged powerful new partnerships. And we crafted a long-term strategy that marries litigation with human rights advocacy and education. All of these accomplishments are steps toward a universal guarantee of women's basic rights to health, autonomy, and dignity.
Learn more about the Center's accomplishments by downloading our 2007 annual report > >
2006 Annual Report
Click here to read the Center's report online > >
World's Abortion Laws Poster 2007
This full-color, 25 x 22 inch world map features up-to-date information about the legal status of abortion in over 190 countries.
Available in English, Spanish, French and Arabic.
Order the map > >
Imposing Misery: The Impact of Manila's Contraception Ban on Women and Families
Likhaan, ReproCen, and the Center for Reproductive Rights have released a report documenting the devastating impact of Manila’s contraception ban on women and their families. In 2000, the mayor of Manila, Jose "Lito" Atienza, issued an Executive Order (EO) "upholding natural family planning" and "discouraging the use of artificial methods of contraception like condoms, pills, intrauterine devices, surgical sterilization, and other [methods]." This sweeping EO, in effect, bans city health centers and hospitals from providing contraception to women in need of this essential reproductive health care service. Poor women are suffering the most under this ban.
The report, Imposing Misery: The Impact of Manila’s Contraception Ban on Women and Families, is based on a series of compelling interviews with women affected by the EO, government and health officials, and nongovernmental organizations. Its conclusions are clear: the EO harms the lives and health of women, as well as their families, by depriving them of the basic human right to make decisions about their own bodies and whether and when to have children. Further, the report establishes that the EO violates national and international law.
This report alerts the Manila City and national government to the violations resulting from the EO and issues recommendations to nullify the policy. Likhaan, ReproCen, and the Center for Reproductive Rights are working to ensure that Manila residents have easy and affordable access to a full range of family planning options, in accordance with the Philippines’ obligations under constitutional, national, and international law. In addition, these three organizations have called on the new mayor, Alfredo S. Lim, who took office this July, to revoke the ban.
New Report produced by the Center and FIDA!
[7/3/07]
Providing women with affordable, accessible, and safe health services is a key obligation of the government of Kenya. However, as a new report produced by the Center for Reproductive Rights and the Federation of Women Lawyers—Kenya vividly illustrates, Kenya’s health care sector suffers from systemic and widespread problems that deny women high quality family planning and maternal health care.
Through interviews with women, health care providers, and government officials, Failure to Deliver: Violations of Women's Human Rights in Kenyan Health Facilities documents a wide range of violations of women's fundamental human rights. Findings include physical and verbal abuse of women seeking maternity services, detention of women and their babies for unpaid medical bills, and staff and equipment shortages that impair the ability to provide good care.
Very few formal channels exist to provide redress for the serious human rights violations taking place in both public and private health care facilities throughout Kenya. This report throws into sharp relief the need to remedy the rights violations that women in Kenya have endured, and to implement systematic changes to ensure that women's rights are protected when they seek reproductive health care.
GAINING GROUND: A Tool for Advancing Reproductive Rights Law Reform
Women's equality and status in society are directly linked to their enjoyment of reproductive rights. Around the world, human rights law and international commitments require governments to reform laws and policies that deny women these rights. Advocates play a crucial role in shaping reforms and ensuring that they translate into genuine progress for women. In this process, advocates can learn from—and build upon—legal and policy advances in other countries and regions.
Gaining Ground is a resource for advocates promoting law reform at the national level. Each chapter, devoted to a key reproductive rights issue, provides positive examples of recently adopted laws and policies from around the world. Gaining Ground is aimed at helping advocates generate ideas for reform and assess what can be realistically achieved in their own countries.
LITIGATING REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS: Using Public Interest Litigation and International Law to Promote Gender Justice in India
This report explores the use of Public Interest Litigation (PIL) to promote gender justice and advance women's reproductive rights in India. Women's reproductive rights in India are severely undermined by gender-biased practices. As a result, women face a wide range of human rights abuses that breach fundamental provisions of the Indian Constitution and international conventions ratified by the Indian government.
This publication shows how a variety of actors can, through the strategic use of PIL, play a role in ensuring that the Indian government upholds its obligations to protect women and provide justice to those whose rights have been violated.
Legal Grounds: Reproductive and Sexual Rights in African Commonwealth Courts
Read the report online (PDF)
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Reproductive and sexual rights, which are guaranteed in international and regional human rights treaties, mean nothing if they are not recognized and enforced by national-level courts. Legal Grounds: Sexual and Reproductive Rights in African Commonwealth Courts is an attempt to provide much-needed information about decisions and gender-relevant jurisprudence of national courts throughout African Commonwealth countries. It offers a crucial starting point for women’s rights advocates who are seeking to further develop their litigation and grassroots strategies.
What If Roe Fell?
If the U.S. Supreme Court were to overturn Roe v. Wade today, over 70 million women in more than half of the country could lose their right to choose abortion within a year's time, some just in a matter of weeks. According to a new study published by the Center for Reproductive Rights, What If Roe Fell?, only 20 states would likely protect women against the enforcement of abortion bans.
Download the report for free in PDF document or order online by visiting our online bookstore.
The Women of the World: Laws and Policies Affecting Their Reproductive Lives regional reports monitor governments' compliance with the reproductive rights mandates established at major international conferences. They are the product of collaborative efforts between the Center for Reproductive Rights and national-level non-governmental organizations around the world examining the laws and policies regarding women's status, marriage, abortion, contraception, sterilization, adolescents, HIV/AIDS and much more. These reports are available for free online in PDF. You can also purchase these reports and other Center resources in our online bookstore.
To order copies of the Women of the Women of the World series or to download copies for free, please click below:
Anglophone Africa |
Eastern Central Europe |
Francophone Africa | Latin America and the Caribbean |
South Asia
Annual Report 2004
Since 1992, the Center for Reproductive Rights has shaped the course of reproductive rights law in the United States and around the world. We use high-impact litigation to ensure that all women have the right to make their own reproductive health choices, to have children, end a pregnancy, and use contraception. We work in partnership with advocates and organizations around the globe to pressure governments to live up to their obligations to women under international treaties.
Our mission encompasses all women’s rights—including adolescents’—to abortion, safe pregnancy, accurate health information, contraception, and prevention of practices harmful to women's health. We are not afraid to file groundbreaking legal cases in the United States and abroad that take on some of the toughest issues. We handle the largest caseload of any reproductive rights organization. We work to ensure that women’s human and reproductive rights are recognized, respected, and protected by the law.
Download the report (PDF)> >
You can also read our
2003 Annual Report (PDF 2.6 MB).
