Marge Berer is the founding editor of Reproductive Health Matters, now starting its 19th year, and has chaired the Steering Committee of the International Consortium for Medical Abortion since 2002. She was chair of Voice for Choice, a coalition of pro-choice organisations in the UK from 2007 to January 2010. She received the Olivia Schieffelin Nordberg Award for Excellence in Writing and Editing in the Population Sciences in May 2007. She was the first chairwoman of the Gender Advisory Panel, WHO Department of Reproductive Health and Research, from 1996 to 2001, and a member of the International Women’s Advisory Panel of the IPPF from 1993-98. She has been working in the UK and internationally since 1976 as an advocate for abortion rights and sexual and reproductive health and rights. She was actively involved in and worked for in the Women’s Global Network for Reproductive Rights and its precursors from 1978-1990. She edited and authored a book in 1991-1993 on women and HIV, sexual and reproductive health, which helped to place these issues on the global agenda. In younger days she taught English as a foreign language and co-authored two textbooks. She has authored numerous papers, organised conferences and workshops, given presentations in conferences and guest lectured for post-graduate students on the issues and on writing for publication. Over the past 30 years, she has focused on the intersection of HIV and sexual and reproductive health, the promotion of condoms, women’s reproductive rights, and maternal mortality, but above all, women’s right to safe, legal abortion internationally.
As a committee of the Irish Parliament considers proposals to offer limited legal abortion in Ireland, this paper explores how these issues came together around Savita Halappanavar’s death, the interpretation of Catholic health policy and the consequences for pregnant women.
The answer is not to promote contraception in order to reduce unsafe abortion, as the FP Summit did. The answer is to promote contraception to reduce unwanted pregnancy and provide safe abortion to every woman who finds herself with an unwanted pregnancy.
Melinda Gates anointed herself as the new saviour of women’s and children’s health, and the press ate it up in both pictures and words. A truly Hollywood event, except this is not entertainment. This is women’s lives.
All I had to do was take a pill every day, I was told, and hey presto, I didn’t have to worry about getting pregnant if I didn’t want to, and it worked! But oh, if only it had all turned out to be that easy.
The abortion pill potentially puts the control over abortion into women’s hands, and a lot of conservative men and women aren’t sure they like that.
Pro-choicers prefer women not to need late abortions, just as we’d prefer there not be any unintended pregnancies. But the answer can never be to refuse women abortions.
