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Maternal mortality claims the life of one woman every minute – more than half a million women every year. This is a human rights scandal. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) is a crucial guarantee of the right to maternal health. The United States is one of only eight countries not to have ratified CEDAW. While Secretary Clinton's State Department supports ratification, the Senate needs to act now. Urge the Senate to ratify CEDAW! Download the action Ratify the Treaty for the Rights of Women! in PDF format | Download the action Ratify the Treaty for the Rights of Women! in RTF format
Jenni Williams and Magodonga Mahlangu continue to live under the threat of trial and imprisonment since their arrest on charges of disturbing the peace on October 16, 2008. On that day, hundreds of WOZA members demonstrated in Bulawayo in support of the government declaring a national emergency and distributing food aid to the nation's hungry citizens.
Urge the Obama Administration to actively support reintroduction and passage by Congress, this fall, of the International Violence Against Women Act (I-VAWA).
Although Peru is a middle-income country, its maternal mortality rate is the second worst in South America. Low-income, rural, and indigenous women are most at risk. Peru has been a focus of the human-right-to-maternal-health community, and President Alan Garcia has promised better equity in maternal health funding. But he has yet to fulfill that promise.
Urge the Nicaraguan government to repeal the criminalization of access to abortion services, even where continuation of a pregnancy endangers a woman's or girl's life or health, or where the pregnancy is a result of rape.
Rape survivors are being denied treatment and care at a South African hospital near the Zimbabwean border if they have not first reported their case to the police. Many of the women struggling to gain access to emergency services at Musina Hospital are asylum-seekers and irregular migrants who were raped while making the hazardous journey across the border from Zimbabwe. The isolated unofficial routes they took left them vulnerable to violence and robbery by organized criminal gangs. Some also e Download the action Rape survivors denied treatment in South Africa in PDF format | Download the action Rape survivors denied treatment in South Africa in RTF format
Last month, the House of Representatives voted to authorize the Office for Global Women's Issues at the State Department. Now, we need the Senate to vote for this office, giving it the thrust of legislative authority and ensuring its permanency at the State Department.
60 percent of people living with HIV and AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa are women. In South Africa, women under 25 are 3-4 times more likely to be infected with the virus and have the highest rate of new infections. Women and girls subjected to violence are at greater risk. Many women lack access to the free health care they are legally entitled to. Ask South Africa to reduce HIV and AIDS and address gender based violence.
Human rights defenders working to end violence against women in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) do so in the face of grave threats of violence against themselves and their families. Justine Masika Bihamba is coordinator for Synergy of Women for Victims of Sexual Violence (Synergie des femmes contre les violence sexuelles), a women's human rights organization working in the DRC. Because of her work, Justine and her family have been targeted.
When the women left their homes that May morning in 2006, they never imagined the horrific experience that lay ahead of them. During a police operation in response to protests by activists from a local peasant organization in San Salvador Atenco, Mexico, over 45 women were arrested without explanation.
