Author: margeberer
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Interview for Amnesty, 22 August 2015
The following are my answers (with some additions) to questions in an interview with Saphia Crowther of Amnesty International via email, for publication by them last year: What drives you to campaign for sexual and reproductive rights? Was there one person, incident or news story that inspired you to become an activist? I became active in my mid-20s…
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IN MEMORIAM Rosa Tunberg
It is with great sadness that I wish to inform everyone who knew her that Rosa Tunberg, who worked for Reproductive Health Matters from October 1999 to August 2007, died from cancer on 10 January 2015 in California. Rosa was born on 5 February 1939, in Santiago, Chile, the middle of three sisters. Her father…
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“Just because abortion is easy doesn’t mean it’s right” : do you agree?
During a day of excellent presentations on the question of “How can a state control swallowing?” on medical abortion and the law, organised by Prof Sally Sheldon of Kent University Law School, an unexpected question was asked from the floor, during the session I chaired: “Just because it [abortion] is easy doesn’t mean it’s right:…
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Opposing the criminalisation of self-use of abortion pills
More officials in European governments seem to have discovered that women are buying MA pills over the internet and are having abortions outside their health systems. The immediate response to this is that these abortions are or should be “illegal”; indeed, they are illegal under the law in Ireland, the UK and Italy, if not…
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Quinacrine: the non-surgical sterilisation method that refuses to die
A response to all the articles on so-called “permanent contraception” in Contraception 2015;92(2):89-176) It is with a deep sigh, after more than 10 years, that I sit down to respond to your articles on “permanent contraception”, particularly the one by Jack Lippes pushing quinacrine sterilisation, that dead letter, to the fore once again, in your…
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The history and role of the criminal law in anti-FGM campaigns: Is the criminal law what is needed, at least in countries like Great Britain?
This article was published online in Reproductive Health Matters 2015;23(46):145-57. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.rhm.2015.10.001. Here is the abstract in English, French and Spanish: Abstract The history of campaigns against female genital mutilation (FGM) began in the 1920s. From the beginning, it was recognised that FGM was considered an important rite of passage between childhood and adulthood for…
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What kind of research is needed for abortion advocacy?
At the 5th Research Meeting on Unwanted Pregnancy and Unsafe Abortion, Mexico City, 28-30 September 2015, Silvina Ramos presented an excellent new CLACAI publication (in Spanish) on a renewed agenda for abortion research in the LAC region: “Investigacion sobre aborto en America Latina y el Caribe: una agenda renovada para informar politicas publicas e incidencias”. I was asked to…
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Women’s right to safe abortion: interview for London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Online Course
Improving the Health of Women, Children and Adolescents: from Evidence to Action is a free online course of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. I was interviewed on the subject of abortion for one of the sessions; this is what I said below. The course first ran in autumn 2015 and is due to be…
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Abortion today: what women need and want
Berer Presentation to Gynuity Medical Abortion Meeting NY 9 June 2015 This is a presentation I gave to a meeting about medical abortion, organised by Gynuity Health Projects in New York, 9 June 2015. Click on the link to read it.
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Another FGM case in Britain that found no harm
Another FGM case, which did not involve the criminal law but family law, and that took place in November 2014 in Leeds, two months before the first criminal trial in London,[1] involved an attempt to take two small children into care: a girl G aged ±3 and a boy B aged ±4, whose parents were…