By Nancy Northup – On Faith guest voice Opinion pages of U.S. newspapers lambasted a decision by St. Joseph’s Hospital, a Catholic institution in Phoenix, over the excommunication and demotion of a nun. Sister Margaret McBride was a head administrator at St. Joseph’s Hospital who compassionately granted a critically ill young woman permission to have […]
March 8, 2010 Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton U.S. Department of State 2201 C Street NW Washington, DC 20520 Dear Secretary Clinton: As President of the Center for Reproductive Rights, I write to express my concern about proposed language in Kenya’s draft constitution that would threaten the health rights of Kenyan women and girls. The […]
17-year-old K.L. took on the country Peru for enabling officials to force her to carry a fatally-impaired fetus to term. When our client K.L. was seventeen years old, she found out that she was pregnant with an anencephalic fetus. Even though abortion is legal in Peru for therapeutic reasons, K.L. was illegally denied access to […]
The A.S. v. Hungary complaint was filed under the Optional Protocol to CEDAW on behalf of a Hungarian woman of Roma origin who was coercively sterilized in a public hospital. The complaint was filed jointly by the Budapest-based Legal Defense Bureau for National and Ethnic Minorities (NEKI) and the European Roma Rights Center (ERRC), and […]
UN Committee Establishes States’ Obligation to Address Maternal Mortality (Updated 3.18.21) In the first-ever maternal mortality case decided by an international human rights body, the United Nations’ Committee on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW Committee) condemned Brazil for failing to provide timely, nondiscriminatory, and appropriate maternal health services to Alyne Da Silva. The Committee recognized that States have a human rights obligation to […]
UN Human Rights Committee Establishes Right to Abortion as a Human Right (Updated 3.18.21) The Center for Reproductive Rights persuaded the United Nations Human Rights Committee (UNHRC) to recognize that women have a human right to access safe and legal abortion. In a ruling that has been cited extensively as precedent in other national-level court decisions on abortion access, the UNHRC established that denying access to legal abortion violates the International Covenant on […]