The International Campaign for Women’s Right to Safe Abortion will bring together all the civil society and other groups working towards improving access to safe and legal abortion and will create a visible and legitimate and active forum for sharing information dissemination and capacity building for advocacy. This campaign will also actively support national work to create support on the ground.

Our aims from this campaign are:

– To build an international campaign to promote universal access to safe, legal abortion as a women’s health and human rights issue.

– 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.

Suggestions For Activities from the Campaign side: 

Launch a long-term campaign for the decriminalisation of abortion in your country and/or if you are a regional network, then in your region.

Strengthen regional connections by creating or expanding a regional network, or bring existing networks together, again where groups can share information, offer cross-border support and resources, and work together in advocacy campaigns to make the problems women have regarding abortion visible across borders.

Form a national coalition bringing together all the groups and organisations working for women’s right to safe abortion and work together, if and when appropriate, and meet in order to share information and ideas and news in person.

If there are women in prison or being prosecuted for having an illegal abortion, or doctors are being prosecuted or harassed by the authorities, start a public campaign for their  release and for an end to all such prosecutions.

Hold a public meeting or a closed meeting for pro-choice advocates and supporters – the possibilities are endless. For example:

• Invite women who have had abortions to come together to talk about their experiences in an informal and safe setting. Get some of them to write these down (anonymously), or record and transcribe them and create a pamphlet afterwards to share with other women.
• Or invite legal experts to talk about the abortion law and policy and why they are good (or bad) for women.
• Or invite pro-choice doctors who provide abortions to talk about why they are pro-choice and why they decided to do abortions – invite medical students to come and listen to them.
• Or invite pro-choice politicians to talk about whether your parliament is likely to consider progressive abortion law reform and what you and they would need to do to prepare and table a bill.
• Have a meeting to talk about what sort of law reform you would like to see – invite legal experts to explain to you what law reform would involve given your current laws, discuss whether decriminalisation or legalisation is more appropriate.
• Or hold a public tribunal to publicise the negative consequences of the criminalisation of abortion in your country, including case histories of what has happened to individual women.

Form an expert committee to draft an abortion law reform bill and launch a campaign alongside supporters in your national parliament, women’s groups, human rights supporters, health and legal professionals, NGOs and prominent people who support a change in the law.

Create and circulate a petition calling for abortion law reform – put it on the web, listserves, SMS text messages, Twitter, Facebook. Set up a survey monkey or use a web-based petition service to collect signatures. Hold a press conference to announce the petition and call for signatures publicly. Hand the signed petition in to your country’s prime minister, health minister, or appropriate person on or around 28 September.

Launch a long-term campaign to ensure that abortion services, including medical abortion, are accessible to women who are legally eligible for an abortion in legally restricted settings.

If they are not approved and available already, start a campaign for government approval of mifepristone and misoprostol as essential medicines, on the World Health Organization’s list, by your national drug regulatory agency and the availability of these drugs in your country at affordable prices.

Do research on women’s experience of unsafe abortion, whether post-abortion care is timely and effective, and/or the type, cost, quality and safety of illegal abortion services in your city or local area – announce you will start the research on 28 September and when you’re done, publicise your findings.

Organise a tweetathon and use other social media to share your messages and activities.

Create a national or regional listserve to enable on-going e-communication between pro-choice groups and individuals where people can share information and get answers to frequently asked questions, and to create a forum for resource sharing, experience sharing, and to break down isolation.

AND SEND DETAILS OF YOUR ACTIVITIES SO WE CAN SHARE THEM WITH EVERYONE IN THE CAMPAIGN VIA THE CAMPAIGN LISTSERVE. Write to: safeabortionwomensright@icma.md