About Me

Hello!!

I’m originally from the USA. I’ve been living and working in the UK since 1973, at first teaching English as a foreign language and then working at national level in the office of the National Abortion Campaign from 1979 to 1981, including as part of the organising committee for the first major abortion rights demonstration of 500,000 people. In 1976, I began working as an author and advocate for abortion rights and sexual and reproductive health and rights, both in the UK and internationally.I was involved in forming and working with the first International Campaign for Abortion Rights from 1978.

I was also part of the large planning group that organised the 4th International Women & Health Meeting in Amsterdam in 1984 on the theme of “No to population control: women decide!”, attended by 400 women from every world region. Following on from that conference, I was one of the co-founders of the Women’s Global Network for Reproductive Rights(WGNRR) in Amsterdam in 1985, and published their newsletter in English, French and Spanish until 1990.

I was then the co-founder of the journal Reproductive Health Matters (RHM), which first met on Halloween in October 1992.I was its editor and director for 23 years from late 1992 untilmid-2015, when it ceased publication, having been acquired unethically, and become someone else’s idea of a journal entirely and with a different name.From mid-2015 to date (end March 2025 at this writing) I have been the coordinator and now mainly the newsletter editor of the International Campaign for Women's Right to Safe Abortion (ICWRSA), which was founded in 2012 in a meeting I called of about 25 heads of international NGOs in London.

I have also been an independent author, editor, advocate and lecturer during all those years. I was a member of the International Women’s Advisory Panel of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) from 1993 to 1998, and the first chairwoman of the Gender Advisory Panel of theWHO Department of Reproductive Health and Research, from 1996 to 2001, and wrote a publication on Safe Motherhood for WHO. I was also an ex-officio member of the Department’s Scientific and Technical Advisory Group and received a certificate thanking me for my contribution.

I also chaired the Steering Committee of the International Consortium for Medical Abortion (ICMA), which put medical abortion pills on the global map; it was founded in 2002 by Peter Hall and continued until 2011. I was also the chair of Voice for Choice, a coalition of pro-choice organisations in the UK, from 2007 to 2009, and am still a member. I also called the first meeting of the European Safe Abortion Networking Group in Paris in 2020, just before the Covid pandemic pushed everyone online, and I chaired the group for about two years. It still meets bimonthly online.

In May 2007,I received the Olivia Schieffelin Nordberg Award for Excellence in Writing and Editing in the Population Sciences. I have been a co-organiser of workshops and small international meetings (from 20-110 people) since 1984, the most important being a forum in Lisbon in 2018 for the ICWRSA. And on 2 November 2017, I was made an Honorary Fellow of the Faculty of Sexual and Reproductive Healthcare of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists in a ceremony at the Royal College of Physicians.

As an author, I wrote the editorials and introductions for the RHM journal and was editor of its half a dozen or so supplements and have published more than 100 articles on a wide range of sexual and reproductive health and rights subjects in RHM and a range of other journals, especially on abortion rights, maternal mortality and morbidity, safe motherhood, SRH-related HIV issues and FGM, over the years. I edited and co-authored a 400+ page book in 1991-1993 with Sunanda Ray on women and HIV/AIDS, sexual and reproductive health, translated from English into Spanish, French, and Portuguese, which helped to place these issues on the global agenda. And I have been publishing the Berer Blog since 2011. Welcome!

Marge Berer, 31 March 2025