Over the past few years there have been regressive changes regarding the reproductive rights of women
Could you please present the NGO you’re working for?
I’m working for a NGO called Health Education and Research Association. The acronym is HERA. We’re part of the IPPF European network which stands for International Planned Parenthood Federation. We are mainly working on improving sexual and reproductive health and rights. We provide free of charge confidential services for key populations. We’re also advocating for better laws and budgets regarding this topic. The NGO was established 15 years ago and has several services. One of them focuses on the Roma community and the other is outreach mobile clinics that goes around the country to provide gynecological services and confidential and voluntary HIV-testing.
What were your main concerns prior to the session? Were there addressed by the Committee?
We came here mainly due to a new abortion law in Macedonia. Over the past few years there have been regressive changes regarding the reproductive rights of women. There’s currently an ongoing campaign by the government on population growth – promoting a family of 3-4 children. There were many dimensions through which women’s rights were called into question. The abortion campaign started in 2008- it was a poster campaign showing horrible images of fetus through the city. After that, religious leaders made some statements to support anti-abortion organizations saying women were murdering babies. After that, there was government involvement, they supported anti-choice NGO’s and at the same time they conducted an advertising campaign and produced 6 video clips. The main objective of the campaign was to inform women on consequences of abortion. The second one was the first-ever Government text using religious vocabulary, stating that the campaign should send messages that a baby was a ‘Blessing of God’. It is strange that the women are absent from the videos, instead, the video’s targeting men from different social groups. They are persuading in a dissuasive way men to take control of their families and wives and the decision to have children. There is only one video on the consequences of abortion and that goes against WHO guidelines who says if abortion is safe and legal the risk of induced abortion is lower than from an injection of penicillin or carrying a pregnancy to term. The campaign was very expensive. The first year we had information on the budget of the campaign and the cost was 0.6 million euros. Afterward the data was not available. However, we made some calculations based on the costs from the first year and the campaign for the past 6 years should cost more 3 million Euros, and cost 3 times the budget for the annual national program protection of Women’s sexual reproductive health. There was no medical based arguments to restrict abortion law as the number of abortions is rapidly decreasing in Macedonia.
The government made some restrictive changes to the law on the 3 following points:
1) Mandatory request to the State – this is the only service that is paid and that is not covered by the Health fund. The women needs to request for the service from the State
2) 3-day mandatory waiting period
3) Mandatory Dissuasive Counseling that is not ethical and degrading for Women as this implies they are not able to make their own choices. It does not have any kind of medical justification and guidelines are not in line with WHO guidelines. The doctor needs to show the image and heartbeat of the embryo. This a method used in Texas for abortion to be legal but to restrict it. Other point is the greatly increased fine for medical providers. It’s 50k euros, which is very high for Macedonia where the median wage is 240 euros or penalty of 3 year’s imprisonment. There is an article in the law that in a dangerous situation when the health and life of the women is in danger the abortion should be performed immediately. However, we have evidence of cases of inevitable miscarriage and foetal death where women have been forced to wait for the elapse of the three day mandatory waiting period for a medical intervention. There is a chilling effect on medical professionals who do not want to make decisions so they leave it for the commissions. Above all this is inhumane and degrading treatment for women.
Do you think your concerns were addressed by the Committee?
We had a good briefing thanks to the CCPR Center. During the dialog we had three questions on this issue to the government on the campaign and new law. We hope that as we had it in the list of issues and in the debate actually the government provided answers which were not true – they have used some irrelevant and incorrect facts. Namely, they argued that these articles were present in the previous law so that everything was even then mandatory but not transparent because it was controlled by the communistic labor institutions that are no longer there –so I hope that the committee members will notify that they did not receive a correct answer and that they will highlight it in the final conclusions.
