The WHO abortion care guideline: Law and policy-Past, present, and future.

In the 2022 Abortion Care Guideline, the World Health Organization (WHO) undertook systematic evidence reviews of seven law and policy interventions to assess their health and social impacts. Distinct recommendations were formulated for each. The present article highlights how the Guideline reconceptualizes abortion regulation as a complex structural intervention that shapes clinical care and service delivery and distributes risks and resources within these systems and in the care relations that define them.

Abortion rights beyond the medico-legal paradigm.

Abortion rights in international law have historically been framed within a medico-legal paradigm, the belief that regulated systems of legal and medical control guarantee safe abortion. However, a growing worldwide practice of self-managed abortion (SMA) supported by feminist activism challenges key precepts of this paradigm. SMA activism has shown that more than medical service delivery matters to safe abortion and has called into question the legal regulation of abortion beyond criminal prohibitions.

In the name of public health: misoprostol and the new criminalization of abortion in Brazil.

This article explores the criminal regulation of misoprostol as a controlled drug in Brazil as a new form of abortion criminalization. A qualitative analysis of Brazilian case law shows how the courts use a public health rhetoric of unsafe abortion to criminalize the distribution of misoprostol in the informal sector. Rather than an invention of the local bench, this judicial rhetoric reflects global public health discourse and policy on unsafe abortion and the double life of misoprostol as both an essential medicine and a controlled drug.

The gender injustice of abortion laws.

This commentary is a response to Katarzyna Sękowska-Kozłowska's article on the treatment of criminal abortion laws as a form of sex discrimination under international human rights law through a study of the communications, Mellet v. Ireland and Whelan v. Ireland.

Decriminalization of abortion - A human rights imperative.

This chapter reviews the evolving consensus in international human rights law, first supporting the liberalization of criminal abortion laws to improve access to care and now supporting their repeal or decriminalization as a human rights imperative to protect the health, equality, and dignity of people. This consensus is based on human rights standards or the authoritative interpretations of U.N.

Understandings of self-managed abortion as health inequity, harm reduction and social change.

This commentary explores how self-managed abortion (SMA) has transformed understandings of and discourses on safe abortion and associated health inequities through an intersection of harm reduction, human rights and collective activism. The article examines three primary understandings of the relationship between SMA and safe abortion: first SMA as health inequity, second SMA as harm reduction, and third SMA as social change, including health system innovation and reform. A more dynamic understanding of the relationship between SMA, safe abortion and health inequities can both improve the design of interventions in the field, and more radically reset reform goals for health systems and other state institutions towards the full realisation of sexual and reproductive health and human rights.

Access to knowledge and the Global Abortion Policies Database.

Research shows that women, healthcare providers, and even policy makers worldwide have limited or inaccurate knowledge of the abortion law and policies in their country. These knowledge gaps sometimes stem from the vague and broad terms of the law, which breed uncertainty and even conflict when unaccompanied by accessible regulation or guidelines. Inconsistency across national law and policy further impedes safe and evidence-based practice.

Human rights education in patient care.

This article explores how human rights education in the health professions can build knowledge, change culture, and empower advocacy. Through a study of educational initiatives in the field, the article analyzes different methods by which health professionals come to see the relevance of human rights norms for their work, to habituate these norms in everyday practice, and to espouse these norms in advocacy for social justice. The article seeks to show the transformative potential of education for human rights in patient care.

Theorizing Time in Abortion Law and Human Rights.

The legal regulation of abortion by gestational age, or length of pregnancy, is a relatively undertheorized dimension of abortion and human rights. Yet struggles over time in abortion law, and its competing representations and meanings, are ultimately struggles over ethical and political values, authority and power, the very stakes that human rights on abortion engage. This article focuses on three struggles over time in abortion and human rights law: those related to morality, health, and justice.

International Human Rights and the Mistreatment of Women During Childbirth.

International human rights bodies have played a critical role in codifying, setting standards, and monitoring human rights violations in the context of sexual and reproductive health and rights. In recent years, these institutions have developed and applied human rights standards in the more particular context of maternal mortality and morbidity, and have increasingly recognized a critical human rights issue in the provision and experience of care during and after pregnancy, including during childbirth. However, the international human rights standards on mistreatment during facility-based childbirth remain, in an early stage of development, focused largely on a discrete subset of experiences, such as forced sterilization and lack of access to emergency obstetric care.

Procedural abortion rights: Ireland and the European Court of Human Rights.

The Irish Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act seeks to clarify the legal ground for abortion in cases of risk to life, and to create procedures to regulate women's access to services under it. This article explores the new law as the outcome of an international human rights litigation strategy premised on state duties to implement abortion laws through clear standards and procedural safeguards. It focuses specifically on the Irish law reform and the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights, including A.

Updated WHO guidance on safe abortion: health and human rights.

Since its first publication in 2003, the World Health Organization's "Safe abortion: technical and policy guidance for health systems" has had an influence on abortion policy, law, and practice worldwide. To reflect significant developments in the clinical, service delivery, and human rights aspects of abortion care, the Guidance was updated in 2012. This article reviews select recommendations of the updated Guidance, highlighting 3 key themes that run throughout its chapters: evidence-based practice and assessment, human rights standards, and a pragmatic orientation to safe and accessible abortion care.

Harm reduction, human rights, and access to information on safer abortion.

A harm reduction and human rights approach, grounded in the principles of neutrality, humanism, and pragmatism, supports women's access to information on the safer self- use of misoprostol in diverse legal settings. Neutrality refers to a focus on the risks and harms of abortion rather than its legal or moral status. Humanism refers to the entitlement of all women to care and concern for their lives and health, to be treated with respect, worth, and dignity, and to the empowerment of women to participate in decision-making and political action.

Human rights in health equity: cervical cancer and HPV vaccines.

This article seeks to demonstrate that health equity, as an empirical and normative concept, is reflected in the human rights to health and equality under international law. The obligations on government that flow from health equity as a human right are then examined. These include the obligation to act in pursuit of health equity as a policy objective, and the obligation to enact measures to ensure health equity as a policy outcome.

Medication abortion in Canada: a right-to-health perspective.

The right to health under the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, to which Canada is a signatory, entitles women to available, accessible, and acceptable abortion care. Abortion care in Canada currently fails this standard. Medication abortion (the use of drugs to terminate a pregnancy) could improve abortion care in Canada, but its potential remains unrealized.

Prenatal management of anencephaly.

About a third of anencephalic fetuses are born alive, but they are not conscious or viable, and soon die. This neural tube defect can be limited by dietary consumption of foliates, and detected prenatally by ultrasound and other means. Many laws permit abortion, on this indication or on the effects of pregnancy and prospects of delivery on a woman's physical or mental health.

Harm reduction or women's rights? Debating access to emergency contraceptive pills in Canada and the United States.

This article compares the ethical pivot points in debates over nonprescription access to emergency contraceptive pills in Canada and the United States. These include women's right to be informed about the contraceptive method and its mechanism of action, pharmacists' conscientious objection concerning the dispensing of emergency contraceptive pills, and rights and equality of access to the method, especially for poor women and minorities. In both countries, arguments in support of expanding access to the pills were shaped by two competing orientations toward health and sexuality.

Women's rights to reproductive and sexual health in a global context.

The worldwide burden of reproductive and sexual ill-health falls disproportionately on women belonging to vulnerable and disadvantaged groups. Women's rights to reproductive and sexual health, as protected under national constitutions as well as regional and international human rights treaties, require that health systems account for the distinctive needs and circumstances both of and among women. The purpose of this article is to investigate what we can do as advocates to ensure that the reproductive and sexual health rights of all women are respected, protected, and enforced, both internationally and in Canada.