Making the Human Rights Case for Safe Abortion Care

To guarantee all women and girls access to safe abortion, it is critical that abortion is not just seen as an essential health service, but also as a human right.

Recognizing abortion as a right creates a more enabling environment where women and girls are better afforded the information and resources they need to effectively access safe abortion care.

Understanding Governmental Obligations

The Center for Reproductive Rights has developed key resources to enable advocates to position abortion as a human rights imperative and advance legal and policy frameworks to this effect. Our Breaking Ground publication sets out the international human rights standards on a range of issues, including abortion, to provides advocates with a succinct and accessible summary of governments’ human rights obligations. Advocates and law and policymakers can use this resource to understand government’s human rights obligations in relation to abortion and subsequently guide policy developments to ensure access to safe abortion.

Case Studies for Expanding Access

Additionally, the Center’s Unite for Reproductive Rights website hosts a database of over 200 court decisions on reproductive rights from across the globe. Users can view cases by issues, such as cases on abortion, to understand how jurisprudence from around the world addresses women and girls’ right to safe and legal abortion and post-abortion care. Advocates and law and policymakers can use the cases on abortion as guides and precedent to promote abortion rights at the national level.

Preserving Rights to Safe Abortion Care

Finally, the Whose Right to Life toolkit is useful in countering attempts to roll back access to abortion through prenatal personhood initiatives, such as those seeking to recognize the right to life prior to birth. This toolkit demonstrates that human rights begin at birth and documents how prenatal personhood can undermine women’s human rights. It also provides examples of how law and policymakers have taken a rights-based approach to advancing prenatal interests, such as by enacting measures to ensure access to quality prenatal care. Advocates and policymakers can use this toolkit to preserve abortion rights in the face of opposition and dismantle existing barriers to legal abortion.

We hope you will find these resources useful. Please feel free to share with us how you are using them to advance access safe abortion and post-abortion care.