Here’s our latest installment from Lisi Owen, an LSRJ international intern working at Engender Rights in the Philippines. The text of this post is an excerpt from a letter Lisi recently published in the Manila Times.

I arrived in Manila to intern with EnGendeRights, a women’s legal NGO, almost ten weeks ago. As I’m preparing to return to the U.S. next week, I’d like to offer my thoughts on reproductive health policy in the Philippines. My departure conveniently coincides with the CBCP’s recent vow to vehemently oppose the reproductive health bill pending in the House of Representatives as part of its “pro-life” stance on family planning, so this letter is all the more appropriate.

I have a staunchly Catholic friend in the U.S. with whom I shared all the recent news articles articulating the CBCP’s position and vow to oppose the RH bill, and his response was that Filipino Catholics need to “wake up.” Spain, Belgium and other Catholic countries have woken up and changed their laws on contraception, and even abortion, so why is the Philippines still sleeping?
In response to the Church’s so-called “pro-life” position, I have this to say: Life is more than the possibility of a fertilized egg. Life is children living in pushcarts on the sidewalk, wearing no pants. Life is women who risk death every time they get pregnant, but continue to do so because their husbands beat them when they refuse sex in the name of “natural family planning.” Life is sitting on your front step waiting to die, because you’re that miserable, and have nothing else to do.

If the Church is pro-life, then I ask this of the bishops: How do you justify the suffering you cause? This is not a matter of the Church or the government sitting idly by and allowing people to suffer, but an active promotion of misery, and it is wrong.
I recognize the American imperialism that has preceded me in the Philippines, and how that might influence your opinion of my views. But before you dismiss me as another American trying to impose my heathenous, western views on a country that’s seen enough outsiders meddling in its business, let me clarify my position: It is one of choice. If you want to practice natural family planning with your partner, that is your prerogative. If you want to capitalize on the benefits of scientific progress to control your own reproductive health, that is your prerogative as well.

It is not, however, the prerogative of the government to impose its own archaic, paternalistic religious views on the suffering people of a nation, (in violation of both the Philippine Constitution and international law, I might add) such that they are stripped of their power of autonomous decision-making.

Our next intern dispatch comes from Lisi Owen, who is an LSRJ intern in Manila, Philippines. Here’s more about Lisi, and then her first fabulous post.

Lisi Owen is a rising 2L at the University of Denver (DU). She wants to pursue a career in public international law and hopes to some day be able to work for the U.N. At DU she is involved with Amnesty International, LSRJ, the Denver Journal for International Law and Policy, and the DU Law Civil Rights Clinic. Outside DU she volunteers with the Colorado Lawyers Committee, the African Community Center, and Dress for Success Denver.

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Hello from the Philippines! As Emily told everyone last week, this summer LSRJ has placed interns in Thailand, the Philippines and Nepal. I am the intern in Manila, Philippines, and am working with EnGendeRights, Inc., a women’s rights legal NGO.

Our biggest project for the summer is working to repeal an executive order of former Manila Mayor Jose “Lito” Atienza that effectively bans modern family planning services (pills, IUDs, ligation, injectables, vasectomies, etc.) in Manila City. Executive Order No. 003 was instituted in 2000 shortly after Atienza took office, and although a new administration has now taken over, the EO has yet to be repealed.

The effect of the contraception ban has been felt most heavily by poor women who are unable to afford contraceptives and other family planning services from private hospitals or who are unable to spend the time and money to travel to other cities where such services are available. For detailed accounts of the burden the ban has placed on these women, you can check out a report compiled by local Philippine NGOs and the Center for Reproductive Rights, in New York, entitled Imposing Misery: The Impact of Manila’s Contraception Ban on Women and Families, available on CRR’s website under publications.

While we are working hard to pressure the current Mayor, Alfredo Lim, to repeal the executive order, and to pressure the national government to maintain a more pro-family planning stance, we have already made some progress in terms of actually addressing the family planning needs of women in Manila. Through a partnership with Marie Stopes we were able to provide free ligation services for women in Tondo, Manila, which is one of the poorest areas in the entire Metro Manila area. Additionally, last Friday in honor of World Population Day the Reproductive Health Advocacy Network held a reproductive health fair, also in Tondo, at which hundreds of women availed of family planning services. Such an event is unprecedented in Manila, and was a huge achievement given the difficulty NGOs and other healthcare providers have faced in the past in providing family planning services in Manila.

I must reiterate Emily’s point about how amazing it is to actually see the accumulation of my academic knowledge “filled in by the color of experience.” Reading about international law and its implementation and actually seeing it on the ground, so to speak, are two entirely different things. It certainly is inspirational and exhilarating to be a part of the latter!

As some of you may know, this summer LSRJ has set up a series of fantastic international opportunities to send law students into the field, and fight for reproductive justice abroad. LSRJ has put dedicated activists in Thailand, the Philippines, and Nepal. Our crew will be blogging about these experiences throughout the month of July. This first post is by Emily Kane. Emily is a rising 3L at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law in Tucson, AZ. A native of California, Emily spent her two years in between undergraduate and law school in Washington, DC at the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism (RAC) doing advocacy work predominantly in the areas of reproductive justice and judicial nominations. She is currently spending her summer as an LSRJ International Intern in and around Mae Sot, Thailand working on international reproductive justice advocacy.

In Thailand, where I am one of two LSRJers placed, we are working on a project through the New York based Global Justice Center. Specifically, we are asking two major questions of international human rights law: 1) are women (and their partners) protected from government pressure and interference in making their family planning choices?; and 2) if maternal birth rates are abnormally high, at what point can a government be blamed? These questions, perhaps seemingly uncomplicated, have not been asked in quite this way and represent uncharted territory in the reproductive justice world. In seeking these answer, we are scouring the net (thank you Westlaw and Lexis Nexis!) and the countryside (interviewing Burmese refugees in western Thailand).

As with all summer law jobs, it is amazing to see the outlines of classroom conversations and mountains of text filled in by the color of experience. Last fall, I took a course about the UN and human rights, related treaties, and the processes by which these treaties are actualized. Reading CEDAW for class last November, while fantastic, cannot compare to reading it now as we try to apply it to the project before us.

Struggling with language barriers, gauging foreign cultural norms, and mining through the vast universe that is international human rights law has been humbling. At the same time, studying the law and (perhaps) finding new avenues to help women attain the international human rights to which they are entitled is emboldening.

The subject line of the email sending me this article read “omg omg omg omg omg.” How else would one react to the following:  an Australian obstetrician/gynecologist, who performed countless surgeries on countless women over the course of his career, has been found to have botched many many surgeries — and to perhaps maliciously alter many more. In one case, a woman went into the hospital to have a small lesion on her labia removed. As she slipped into unconsciousness (from the anesthesia), he leaned over and whispered to her, “I’m going to take your clitoris too.” Sure enough, she woke up to the searing pain of genital mutilation. Because of her trauma and embarrassment, the woman didn’t speak up for two whole years. Because no one was checking credentials, neither this woman nor the countless others who visited Dr. Graeme Reeves, knew that he had been barred from practicing obstetrics in 1997 because he had refused to treat a woman’s puerperal fever. The woman later died. The medical board found that the doctor had “impaired mental capacity”. But he didn’t stop practicing, and he even lied his way into a job in 2002–the position in which he later mutilated Carolyn, the woman whose story is related above. There’s more:  

 Another woman went in for surgery on an ovarian lesion, and ended up with both ovaries, both Fallopian tubes removed; and a kidney gone, also, after complications ensued.

Another woman reports that Reeves failed to use gloves when performing a gynaecological examination, and used an “intimate, sexual” touch, as well as touching her breasts unexpectedly.

Another woman says that Reeves spent over an hour painfully attempting to insert an IUD after she had an abnormal Pap smear, saying “I haven’t got this right”. He performed no cervical biopsy, and she was later found to be riddled with cancer throughout her pelvis. 

So how did Dr. Reeves get this far? Why did more women not speak up?  And why, for the love of all that is holy, is Dr. Reeves’ medical malpractice insurance not covering care for Carolyn’s injuries? Like Hoyden (linked above), I’m going to say that this is a product of patriarchy at work. Hoyden writes:

This isn’t a borderline case, a known but unfortunate side effect, a medical slip: this is a seriously impaired doctor practising for many months in completely inappropriate ways, mutilating, and raping patients - and nobody around him, not his colleagues, not nurses or other staff, were able to stop him. Did they convince themselves that it “wasn’t that serious, really”? Did they convince themselves it was none of their business? Did they fear personal repercussions should they blow the whistle? Why did nobody so much as check his registration when he was employed? 

No one spoke up because women are told to feel shame about their bodies, and are made to feel like deviants for talking or thinking about their sexual and reproductive health. Carolyn waited two years (two years!) before speaking up about what Dr. Reeves did to her. And while I can’t for the life of me begin to explain why Reeves did this, I can’t help but think that it’s in some way connected to some sort of patriarchy-fueled desire to mark/own/control women’s bodies.What’s more, our society (this took place in Australia but is reflective of trends worldwide) continues to tsk-tsk men like this but not really to punish them. Dr. Reeves is not practicing any more, true, but he’s not in jail. Seems to me he’s much more dangerous than the average non-violent drug offender who finds him or her-self serving a long prison term, a victim of the US’s overly harsh drug laws. So now, 11 years after the first complaint was lodged about Reeves, he’s finally being held back from raping and injuring any more women (even if not by jail cell bars). But 11 years!? Makes me wonder if we’ve made much headway tackling subconscious misogyny and antipathy toward women’s sexual lives. 

..But not in the way you might think.

For some time now, abortion rights advocates and other social justice activists have been pushing to bring women’s rights into the rubric of human rights. A Center for Reproductive Rights button that I’ve often seen pinned to jackets and bags at rallies reads: Reproductive Rights are Human Rights. The same could of course be said for women’s rights more broadly — women’s rights are human rights. But the U.S. has been slow to recognize them as such, and has snubbed international human rights bodies (like the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights) even when it does recognize something as a human right. Women’s rights organizations fight against sexual exploitation and the enslavement of women around the world, again relying on human rights norms.

Which is why it’s so jarring to see radical anti-woman and anti-abortion activists trying to usurp these terms. As Salon’s Broadsheet reported yesterday, “a group of African-American antiabortion activists will be holding three events in the Bay Area this month in support of the idea that “abortion is the Darfur of America.” The leader of the event will be San Francisco’s Walter Hoye, the founder of the Issues4Life Foundation, who calls abortion “the leading cause of death in the African American community.” The rally’s organizers, like George W. Bush and other anti-abortion extremists, also compare abortion to slavery, and Roe v. Wade to Dred Scott. Hoye also likens opposition to reproductive justice and abortion rights to the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. From Broadsheet:

“‘It is not the first time a segment of the community has had their rights denied,’” he’s quoted as saying. “‘It is a civil rights issue because it is dehumanizing and not giving proper status as a citizen. Most people on the opposite side think it is not a person, just like they did during slavery. It is not the first time this country has done something wrong.’”

While I would agree with him that Dred Scott was wrong and that the U.S. has an ugly history of treating Blacks as less than full citizens, that’s where our agreement ends. And it’s worth noting a gaping hole in Hoye’s legal argument. Again from Broadsheet:

I have to admit to being a little confused by the logic here. Are we calling abortion genocide? Or are we saying that fetuses are slaves? Can you have civil rights if you don’t have fingernails? And do either of these comparisons make any sense? It seems as if they share the same general tactic: Think of something really, really bad, and then say it’s like abortion. This could lead to great bumper stickers: “Abortion = Auschwitz.” “Osama Bin Laden [hearts] Planned Parenthood.” “Your Doctor Raped My Fetus.” Attention-grabbers, sure — but not the most logical arguments on the block.

What’s more, Hoye, like so many other anti-woman extremists, not only fights against abortion rights, but also against the comprehensive sex education programs and healthcare reform that could prevent unintended pregnancies in the first place, and could bring birth control usage rates among poor communities to levels equaling its use in wealthier areas. So Hoye, again like so many others with whom his views are aligned, pushes a lose-lose situation for women: continued lack of access to information and contraception coupled with an inability to terminate pregnancies that a woman does not want to or cannot bring to term.

And Hoye does all of this in opposition to the NAACP, the Nation’s leading Black civil rights organization. Rev. Amos Brown, the President of the San Francisco NAACP, isn’t mincing words. He says:

“San Francisco’s top civil rights issues are education, economic empowerment and political engagement,” Brown said. “African American students are behind every ethnic group in this city academically. People who are learned and informed do the right thing. If not, they engage in destructive behavior. These pro-life people are demagogues and ideologues…”

The bottom line is that abortion is a civil rights and human rights issue, but not in the ways that Hoye thinks it is. Abortion rights, and related reproductive justice initiatives, protect and advance the civil rights of women in the U.S. An expansion of funding for education and contraception and an end to the Hyde Amendment would ensure that no woman is denied her right to self-determination (a right so central to civil rights) simply because she is poor or because she lives in a certain part of the country or a certain state. If we really care about civil rights and not just the rhetoric surrounding them, this is the side we should be on.

This news item might be the least surprising of the day, but it’s still worth noting.

A Guttmacher Institute report issued today shows that abortions are no less common in countries where the procedure is illegal than in countries where it’s legally sanctioned. No surprise there. Those of us who follow this issue know that women will get abortions whether abortion is legal or not. We saw it in the U.S. before Roe, and we see it now in many countries around the world where abortion remains illegal or inaccessible.*
But illegal abortion is dangerous for women’s health.

Though abortion is very safe when performed in a clean facility by a medical professional, illegal abortions account for 13% of the world’s maternal mortality (see chart). This is especially worrisome given that 97% of unsafe abortions took place in poor countries, where medical care to treat the results of an unsafe abortion is severely lacking. And it affects the vast majority of women in the world, with 9 out of 10 women worldwide seeking abortions before their 45th birthdays.

Today’s report provides yet more proof that if we are really “pro-life,” we must support reproductive freedom and legal abortion. Because nothing is less supportive of life than a policy that ensures that women will die because they cannot obtain safe and clean health care when they need it and want it.

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* Which is not to say that abortion is accessible in the U.S. Only 13% of American counties have an abortion provider, and several states have laws further restricting the availability of abortion for all women, but especially minors and poor women. But abortion is legal in the U.S.

There are over 1.1 billion Catholics in the world. The lion’s share of those are in South and Central America, where religious observance is high, abortion is often illegal, and rates of birth control use are low. And the Pope isn’t to happy about that. The New York Times reported the other day that the Pope, in a visit to Vienna, called on politicians to help reverse declining birthrates there and in other European countries:

Benedict stressed demographics as he repeated, in a strong multifront attack, the Vatican’s long-held opposition to abortion.

“I appeal, then, to political leaders not to allow children to be considered as a form of illness,” he said in his native German to a gathering of diplomats. “I say this out of concern for humanity. But that is only one side of this disturbing problem.

“The other is the need to do everything possible to make European countries once again open to welcoming children,” he added, in this nation with a low birthrate. “Encourage young married couples to establish new families and to become mothers and fathers! You will not only assist them, but you will benefit society as a whole.”

He further said that children should not “be considered a form of illness.” We can all recognize that birthrates in Europe are declining. Italy’s birthrate is at an all-time low. And religious observance is on the wane in countries that have long been among the most staunchly Catholic in the world. The Pope is right to say that Catholicism “profoundly shaped the [European] continent.”

But what makes me uncomfortable is what he said next: that Europe’s embracing of legalized abortion and rejection of Catholic teachings regarding birth control could threaten the continent’s existence, leaving a world where Catholicism predominates not in traditionally white European countries but in Latin American countries that are devout in the way Europe used to be.

While praying in the shadows of Vienna’s holocaust memorial, the Pope called out abortion as the threat to European humanity. Might that have been a good moment to talk instead about the horrors of genocide, and perhaps to bring up Rwanda or Darfur? Or to highlight the importance of universal healthcare in healing the ill and ensuring a society that respects its citizens? Seems to me like a real missed opportunity.

(h/t Sheila)