Everyone should be able to make decisions about their own body.
Every woman and girl has sexual and reproductive rights . This means they are entitled to equal access to health services like contraception and safe abortions, to choose if, when, and who they marry, and to decide if they want to have children and if so how many, when and with who.
Women should be able to live without fear of gender-based violence, including rape and other sexual violence, female genital mutilation (FGM), forced marriage, forced pregnancy, forced abortion, or forced sterilization.
But there’s a long way to go until all women can enjoy these rights.
For example, many women and girls around the world are still unable to access safe and legal abortions. In several countries, people who want or need to end pregnancies are often forced to make an impossible choice: put their lives at risk or go to jail.
In Argentina, Amnesty International has campaigned alongside grassroots human rights defenders to change the country’s strict abortion laws. There have been some major steps forward, but women and girls are still being harmed by laws which mean they cannot make choices about their own bodies.
We have also campaigned successfully in Ireland and Northern Ireland, where abortion was recently decriminalised after many decades of lobbying by Amnesty and other rights groups.
In Poland along with more than 200 human and women’s rights organisations from across the globe, Amnesty has co-signed a joint statement protesting the ‘Stop Abortion’ bill.
South Korea has recently seen major advances in sexual and reproductive rights after many years of campaigning by Amnesty and other groups, culminating in a ruling by South Korea’s Constitutional Court that orders the government to decriminalize abortion in the country and reform the country’s highly restrictive abortion laws by the end of 2020.
In Burkina Faso, Amnesty International has supported women and girls in their fight against forced marriage, which affects a huge number of girls especially in rural areas.
And in Sierra Leone, Amnesty International has been working with local communities as part of our Human Rights Education Programme, which focuses on a number of human rights issues, including female genital mutilation.
In Zimbabwe, we found that women and girls were left vulnerable to unwanted pregnancies and a higher risk of HIV infection because of widespread confusion around sexual consent and access to sexual health services. This meant that girls would face discrimination, the risk of child marriage, economic hardship and barriers to education.
In Jordan Amnesty International has urged authorities to stop colluding with an abusive male “guardianship” system which controls women’s lives and limits their personal freedoms, including detaining women accused of leaving home without permission or having sex outside marriage and subjecting them to humiliating “virginity tests”.