Ramona Vijeyarasa

RH Reality Check, Southeast Asia

Ramona Vijeyarasa is a PhD candidate with the School of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia. She is undertaking a comparative study of the underlying causes of trafficking in women and girls for labor and sexual exploitation. She has worked with the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in both Vietnam and Ukraine and the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR) and International Center for Transitional Justice, both in New York. Ramona’s work at CRR included litigation and advocacy in the Philippines, India, Nepal, Slovakia, Poland and Moldova, around issues of access to contraception, abortion, post-abortion care and maternal mortality. Ramona earned her LL.M. degree in international law from New York University School of Law and received a Bachelor of Arts (Politics and History) and Bachelor of Laws from UNSW, following which she practiced commercial law. She has published on a range of issues including transitional justice, trafficking and gender inequality through the lens of the MDGs.

There is No Choice Without Knowledge

There are some decisions which can be only me made by us as individuals. These are inviolable personal choices. These are the decisions about our sexuality and how we will express it, about our bodies and what we will and will not do with them. But to make these personal choices, we need knowledge.

Unsafe Abortion: Why Money Might Matter

If aid is meant to create cost-effective, efficient and sustainable health care systems, African nations and the global community must address the high number of unsafe abortions and the needless waste of money spent addressing complications.