YANAA

Girls and young women are the best advocates for their own rights and health.

Join YANAA!

YANAA is a strong, supportive group of organisations and individuals among young abortion advocates who want to share their experiences and learn from each other. To apply to join YANAA, fill out the form here.

The Young Activist Network for Abortion Advocacy (YANAA) is a part of the International Campaign for Women’s Right to Safe Abortion.

Forming a youth network was proposed at the young women’s workshop at the Campaign’s International Forum in Lisbon in October 2018. After the Forum, a Steering Committee was formed who met in June 2019 and developed a strategic plan, and YANAA was launched publicly by the Steering Committee. We held our first Twitter chat to coincide with International Safe Abortion Day on 28 September 2019.

The current Steering Committee consists of young women from India, Malaysia, South Africa, Sudan and the Netherlands, who are regional representatives.

YANAA is committed to advancing abortion rights in all world regions, exploring the wide range of youth perspectives, and building advocacy strategies on all aspects of abortion, from access to abortion pills to decriminalisation of abortion in law and policy.

Our aim is to build a movement that highlights the intersectional issues around abortion that girls and young women around the world consider important, including the freedom to choose one’s partner, and the freedom to decide whether/when/who to marry and if/when/how many children to have. Other important issues are the intersection of abortion rights with digital rights of young women, and the intersection of abortion rights with issues of climate justice.

 

Image: Not One Less mobilisation at Congressional Square in Buenos Aires, June 4, 2018. Photograph by Prensa Obrera

 

Why is YANAA important?

  • Adolescents suffer the most from the negative consequences of unsafe abortion. Forty-one per cent of unsafe abortions in developing regions are among young women aged 15–24 years – 15% among those aged 15–19 years and 26% among those aged 20–24 years. (Shah and Ahman, 2012)
  • Age alone creates a barrier to accessing sexual and reproductive health services, including abortion, due to cultural and social expectations on girls and young women. As a result, accurate information on abortion and youth-friendly services are often not available or accessible to them.
  • Girls and young women are often judged for seeking or having abortions, even when sex was without their consent or coerced.
  • Laws and policies on abortion in some countries are highly restrictive, including the requirement of parental consent for abortion. Girls and young women are often seen as incapable of making their own informed decisions, a belief that is largely driven by conservative cultural and religious values around sexual rights and reproductive autonomy.

 

Our aims

  • To campaign for the decriminalisation of abortion with a specific focus on how laws and policies affect young people.
  • To highlight the lack of evidence about the need for abortion, especially among young girls, and promote universal access to safe abortion as a health and human right issue.
  • To promote inter-generational dialogue between feminists on safe abortion activism and develop a platform for young people to share their specific issues and experiences.
  • To promote the leadership of young feminists on the abortion issue and support the participation of young leaders on global platforms.

 

Our vision for change

  • To make girls’ and young women’s activism and advocacy work more visible by supporting and promoting their work.
  • To ensure that girls’ and young women’s issues become part of new research within the mainstream abortion research agenda.
  • To ensure that youth-led research by girls and young women is a part of research and policy initiatives at global, regional and national levels.

 

What we do

Image: Designed by Alia Sinha

  • We organise the online workshop series, titled ‘Youth Talk Abortion’ (YTA) for young people to build their capacities on rights-based abortion advocacy. The YTA series is organised annually. The workshops are for young people from all the world regions. Feminist and youth activists are invited as resource persons to share knowledge on diverse topics.
  • We organise panel discussions to amplify the voices of our youth members from different world regions.
  • We use our social media and google group to share the latest information with our community from around the world. The information is focused on the safe abortion movement.
  • Every year, we collaborate with the working group of the International Day of Action for Women’s Health (28 May) and International Safe Abortion Day (28 September). We contribute towards deciding the theme of the International Safe Abortion Day each year. We organise events to mark the day.

 

Follow us on social media at:

YouTube: @YANAA Global, where we share our audio-visual resources 

Twitter: @yanaanetwork

Instagram:@yanaanetwork

LinkedIn: YANAA

 

Read our reports:

  1. Young Activists for Abortion: Global Meeting, 8th December 2023
  2. Young Activists for Abortion: Asia Regional Meeting, 2023
  3. Roundtable Discussion: Young People’s Activism and Safe Abortion, 2022
  4. Values Clarification and Attitude Transformation: An Online Workshop, 2021 at: https://mailchi.mp/safeabortionwomensright/10-nov-2021?e=8b8d302b7c

 

For any enquiries, please contact us at e-mail: yanaaglobal@gmail.com