Solidarity Requests 2020

THAILAND SOLIDARITY: NEW REQUEST!! PLEASE SIGN!!!

The Civil Society Network of 41 organisations has a new petition for us to sign.
The petition calls on the government to:

1. Decriminalise women who seek and have an abortion. Delete Clause 301 in the current law which criminalises women who have abortions except….
2. Permit abortion up to 24 weeks on the woman’s request, and after 24 weeks in the few cases that occur, on the following grounds – to protect the woman’s health, grounds of rape, serious fetal anomaly, contraceptive failure, and socio-economic reasons.

We call on every Campaign member to sign this petition as an organisation or an individual

To sign the petition as an individual, please go to this website, where the text is in Thai and English: http://chng.it/QJjgTLrX

To sign the petition as an organisation, please write to this email: sulaipornc@gmail.com

URGENT SOLIDARITY ACTION: TODAY BEFORE 1PM (USA Eastern Time)

Yesterday word began circulating around the world that Donald Trump has written two letters, one to the Director-General of the World Health Organization and one to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, demanding that any reference to abortion and to sexual and reproductive health be removed from the Covid-19 response because he is anti-abortion. He also threatened to withdraw the USA from WHO because of the influence of China. Moreover, he circulated a statement against SRHR/abortion at the (online) World Health Assembly this week. Here are the letters/statement:

TO: Director-General Dr Tedros, WHO

TO: Secretary-General Guterres, UN

TO: World Health Assembly 

An open letter in support of SRHR and safe abortion, in response, addressed to Dr Tedros and Mr Guterres, has been written by a number of INGOs for signatures. We are calling on everyone, whether on behalf of your group or as an individual, to sign the letter and share this message and request for signatures with everyone in your networks.

THAILAND: Petition to the Department of Health to ensure that women can access safe abortion services during the COVID-19 pandemic

Choices Network Thailand, Tamtang and other Thai NGOs have drafted a letter to the Thai Department of Health calling for access to contraception and safe abortion to be ensured during the Covid-19 pandemic. It is addressed to the Director of the Department of Health of Thailand. It calls on them to ensure women’s access to safe abortion, which has decreased in several places since the pandemic began. The full report from 8 May is here. The full letter to support is here.

PLEASE SIGN BY 14 MAY 2020: the individual link is below. To put your organisation’s name in the open letter, write to: sulaipornc@gmail.com

Solidarity request: Netherlands

Following the decision by a court in the Netherlands earlier this month not to approve telemedicine for first trimester abortion, a petition has been posted on avaaz.org, calling on the parliament in the Netherlands as follows: “Women who live with anyone who has Covid-19 symptoms should not visit an abortion clinic. So they cannot terminate an unwanted pregnancy. This also applies to people who cannot visit an abortion clinic unnoticed because of an unsafe home situation. We see this as a violation of the right to abortion.” The petition asks the House of Representatives to “find an emergency solution to this situation, e.g. by adopting an urgent law that guarantees the right to abortion in the time of Covid-19”.

Note: The slogan in the photograph is taken from the original slogan “Boss of My Own Belly” coined by Wij Vrouwen Eisen (We Women Demand), the national campaign in the Netherlands, launched in 1979, to demand legal abortion. Ook nu = also now!