Mission
To bring together organisations and individuals who support and promote universal access to safe abortion as a women’s health and human rights issue − through knowledge creation and sharing, debate and dialogue, network and coalition building, sharing of skills and experience, and create a shared platform for advocacy.
Goals
- Safe abortion as a universally accessible, publicly available and funded healthcare service.
- Full social and legal decriminalisation of abortion.
Objectives
- To support women’s autonomy to make their own decisions whether and when to have children and have access to the means of acting on those decisions without risk to their health and lives.
- To campaign for a moratorium on prosecutions for abortion and the removal of abortion from the criminal law.
- To promote the legitimacy of the right to safe abortion in international, regional and national forums addressing women’s health and rights.
- To make the impact of unsafe and illegal abortion on women’s lives visible.
- To increase public awareness of women’s need for safe abortion, in order to increase public understanding and support.
- To promote young women’s leadership in the campaign at all levels.
- To build strategic partnerships with health professionals, policymakers, researchers, and UN and human rights defenders.
- To share evidence-based information, standards and guidelines to inform and improve policy, programmes and practice.
- To develop and disseminate key messages to counter the influence of the anti-abortion movement and claim the decision to have an abortion as a moral decision.
Intended outcomes
- Increased attention to and support for the right to safe abortion in key international, regional, and national decision-making spaces.
- Increased visibility and public awareness of the negative impact of unsafe abortion.
- Contribute to the reduction of stigma around obtaining an abortion and around the provision of safe abortion care.
- Greater understanding that the right to decide whether and when to have children is a critical aspect of gender equality, sexual and reproductive autonomy, and the right to life and health.
Guiding principles
We believe in and advocate for safe and legal abortion as a woman’s human right.
Women must be able to take decisions about their own bodies and health care free from coercion: this includes the decision to carry a pregnancy to term or have an abortion. No woman should be obliged to continue an unwanted pregnancy.
Women’s human rights should be respected, protected and fulfilled.
These include the right to life, the highest attainable standard of health, bodily integrity, the benefits of scientific progress, and to information, privacy, freedom from cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, and equality and non-discrimination. The failure to give women access to safe abortion puts these rights at risk.
No woman’s health or life should be placed at risk because safe abortion services are not available to her.
All barriers to women’s access to safe abortion should be removed. Women should be afforded universal access to abortion, delivered according to the most up-to-date WHO guidance. Access to safe abortion is a matter of equity and should never be compromised. Abortion should be an integral part of women’s health services, and should be provided as early as possible but at the same time not refusing later abortions, as the reasons are often compelling.
Abortion should not be restricted, prohibited or criminalised.
No woman who has sought an abortion, and no health care provider who has provided a safe abortion at a woman’s request, and no abortion rights defender should be stigmatised, harassed, discriminated against, or prosecuted. Governments should take action to remove laws that restrict, prohibit or criminalise abortion and remove procedural barriers that restrict access to safe abortion services.
Note
Here and throughout this website “women” should also be understood to include all others who are physically able to become pregnant, e.g. young girls and transgender men.