Sexual and Reproductive Rights
Women and girls, especially those from poor and marginalized communities, were prevented from fully exercising their sexual and reproductive rights. Many continued to be denied the reproductive health services provided for in the 2009 Health Law, as the Ministry of Health had yet to issue the necessary implementing regulation. The government failed to challenge discriminatory attitudes and cruel, inhuman and degrading practices, including female genital mutilation and early marriages.
- In June, the Minister of Health defended a November 2010 regulation permitting specifically defined forms of “female circumcision” when performed by doctors, nurses and midwives. The regulation legitimized the widespread practice of female genital mutilation. It also violated a number of Indonesian laws and contradicted government pledges to enhance gender equality and combat discrimination against women.
The maternal mortality ratio remained one of the highest in the region.
Read more about this topic: Human Rights In Indonesia
Famous quotes containing the words reproductive and/or rights:
“The blind conviction that we have to do something about other people’s reproductive behaviour, and that we may have to do it whether they like it or not, derives from the assumption that the world belongs to us, who have so expertly depleted its resources, rather than to them, who have not.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
“If the veil were withdrawn from the sanctuary of domestic life, and man could look upon the fear, the loathing, the detestations which his tyranny and reckless gratification of self has caused to take the place of confiding love, which placed a woman in his power, he would shudder at the hideous wrong of the present regulations of the domestic abode.”
—Lydia Jane Pierson, U.S. women’s rights activist and corresponding editor of The Woman’s Advocate. The Woman’s Advocate, represented in The Lily, pp. 117-8 (1855-1858 or 1860)