Losing the Global Fight for Women’s Health

NEW YORKâ€" Sometimes it does seem there’s a war over women’s bodies, and nowhere does this seem more dangerous than in the large number of regions where abortion is illegal, unsafe and life-threatening.

In the United States, anti-abortion forces have lately succeeded in their drive to chip away at a woman’s right to choose, as I write in my latest Female Factor column, but women in several regions of the world face bigger obstacles.

Much of Latin America, Africa and Asia - approximately 25 percent of the world’s population - have highly restrictive abortion laws. Few countries across the swath of southern continents, from Africa to Southeast Asia, have enacted abortion rights laws and measures to protect women’s reproductive health.

In deeply Roman Catholic and patriarchal Latin America, where anti-abortion church dogma and macho traditions predominate, abortion on demand is allowed nationally only in Cuba,Guyana, Puerto Rico and Uruguay (and in Mexico City, but not in the rest of Mexico).

Yet the region has the highest estimated rates of abortions in the world, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive-health research and policy organization based in New York.

Some 4.4 million abortions were performed in Latin America in 2008, and 95 percent of those were unsafe, Guttmacher reported.

In most of those countries women seeking abortions go to midwives and other practitioners who use unsafe techniques, and some women perform abortions on themselves with drugs and other abortion-inducing methods. More than one thousand women in the region die and one million are hospitalized each year after undergoing backstreet abortions, according to the World Health Organization.

Such conditions came to the world’s attention recently with the case of a Salvadoran woman called “Beatriz,” who had lupus and kidney failure while pregnant with! a 26-week-old baby who was missing parts of its brain and was certain to die once removed from the womb. Beatriz was doomed as well, likely to die giving birth.

With the mother’s life at risk and the unborn child certain to die, El Salvador’s Supreme Court decided to abide by Salvadoran law and ruled that Beatriz did not have a right to an abortion, not even to save her life.

But at the last minute a compromise was reached. Beatriz was allowed to have the child by Caesarean section. Since she was past 20 weeks of pregnancy, the procedure was considered an “induced birth,” not an abortion. The child was delivered and died within hours, but Beatriz survived.

“Over the last decade, throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, there has been a clear offensive against the rights of women,’’ Erika Guevara, the director for Latin America and the Caribbean for the Global Fund for Women, told me last week. “Anti-abortion laws, in particular, have been used as a way to attack womenâ€s rights and diminish their political and social strength and influence.”

But, she said, “Things are slowly starting to change for the better.” In 2007, abortion was legalized in Mexico City, and in 2012, Uruguay approved legal abortions in all circumstances, though only during the first trimester of pregnancy.

“Progress comes with serious reservations,’’ she said in an email. In Uruguay, “women seeking abortion services are required to present their case before an interdisciplinary panel comprised of three professionals - a doctor, a psychologist and a social worker - and listen to advice about alternatives including adoption and support services. Women must then wait for five days to reflect on the consequences of their decision.”

The situation for women may be worse in parts of Africa.

“Unfortunately, in many places, such as Ethiopia and Tanzania, women are dying simply because they did not have access to safe abortion or contraception to prevent unwanted ! pregnancy! ,” Pamela W. Barnes, president and chief executive of EngenderHealth, a global women’s health nonprofit, said last week.

What she has seen on the ground in the 20 countries where EngenderHealth works has taught her that access to contraception and to abortions are critical to women’s health, she said.

“Maternal health can only be achieved if a woman can prevent an unwanted pregnancy in the first place through family planning and access to safe abortion,’’ she noted. “Millions of lives are at stake.”

In Berlin, Walls on the Wall

The German photographer Kai Wiedenhöfer was a student when the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989. It was the most “positive and exciting political event that I witnessed in my life,” he said. “It deeply moved me and never left me.”

Twenty-three years later Mr.Wiedenhöfer, now 47, is preparing to plaster 36 photographs on 364 meters of one the longest remaining portions of the Berlin wall that divided the city for 28 years. His exhibition, “Wall on Wall,” will be at Mühlenstrasse, on a part of the wall overlooking the River Spree. The photos show walls that divide people, cultures and territories in Ireland, Iraq, Cyprus, Palestine, Morocco, North and South Korea and between the U.S. and Mexican border.

Mr.Wiedenhöfer first thought of exhibiting his images on the Berlin Wall when he photographed the wall built by the Israeli government in occupied Palestinian territories in 2003, returning every six months to document the construction. The series of panoramic photographs depict life in the shadow of the wall (they were published in a book in 2007). The photographer had concluded that barriers are “proof of human weaknesses and errors, the inability of human beings to communicate with each other.”

Neil Burgess, an agent based in Britain who represents photographers such as Sebastiao Salgado and Annie Leibovitz, is a longtime supporter of Mr.Wiedenhöfer’s work and is assisting him with the project. Adrienne Goehler, a former cultural minister of the Berlin government and former head of the academy of fine arts in Hamburg, is curating the exhibition.

It took Mr.Wiedenhöfer five years to receive permission for the project from the city of Berlin. The permit was finally granted when Mr.Wiedenhöfer’s propos! al included a variety of images of walls taken between 2006 and 2012 after his experience in Palestine. The aim, he said, is to stress that walls and border fences are no solution to today’s global political and economic problems.

The back and forth with the Berlin municipality did take a toll on Mr.Wiedenhöfer and Ms. Goehler, however.
“It almost drove us crazy,” said Ms. Goehler. “We had all kinds of offers to do the exhibition if we left out the wall in the West Bank. The most astonishing fact was that officials had this idea that walls have only one narrative. What is most important for me is the human aspect â€" that these walls are separating people.”

In all, Mr.Wiedenhöfer made 21 trips for his project, which is also planned as a book, to be published in German and English, called “Co-Frontiers.”

Mr.Wiedenhöfer worked in Northern Ireland in the 1990s,and was dismayed, when he returned to Belfast in 2008, to see construction of what are called “peace lines” stretching over 34 kilometers. Images of this stark barrier and othersâ€"the highly controlled wall and border between North and South Korea; the dilapidated wall in Nicosia, Cyprus; barriers in Ceuta and Melilla â€" fragments of Spain in Morocco; a wall in Baghdad built by the U.S. Army, or the nine-meter high concrete wall snaking through the West Bank are among the images that will be on view.

Taken with large-format panoramic cameras, Mr.Wiedenhöfer’s photographs will be next to a seg! ment of t! he wall that has recently became a subject of intense controversy: Developers hope to tear down a portion of it in order to erect luxury apartment buildings; protesters have been fighting to retain the wall as a historical monument.

Given the history of tagging and street art on the wall, Ms. Goehler said she would be very interested in the public’s reaction. Mr.Wiedenhöfer recently conducted a three-week experiment in Berlin exhibiting his photograph of the barrier in Tijuana; it was left undamaged.

“Nothing happened, people respected it,” said Ms. Goehler, who hopes the exhibition will travel to countries where there are walls. “I would be so happy if my prognosis were correctâ€"that people can make the difference between quality and junk. It is an open and collective process, a space for debate.”

“The Berlin Wall was proof that peace begins only when they fall.” Said Mr.Wiedenhöfer.

“Wall onWall” will be on view through July.