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© Laura Flanders

Women's Health, Sexual Rights, and Reproductive Rights

Recognizing the relationship between women's health and human rights, MADRE promotes women's health within a rights-based framework. MADRE works to improve access to healthcare for women and their families by providing primary, reproductive and mental health services and by providing urgently needed medical supplies and medicines. MADRE also offers trainings for women and youth about their sexual rights and reproductive rights and tools with which to hold their governments accountable to healthcare and human rights commitments.

MADRE Articles

  • It's Not Just an Abortion Ban: The Christian Right's Global Agenda
  • Abstaining from Greed and Dogma: The AIDS Policy We Should Call for in 2007
  • ALERT: Nicaraguan Assembly Bans Abortion
  • A Women's Rights-based Approach to Climate Change
  • State of the Union 2006: George's Big Nothing
  • African Women Confront Bush's AIDS Policy
  • Sexual Rights are Human Rights: A MADRE Position Paper
  • Reproductive Choice and Women’s Human Rights
  • Patent Rights Over Human Rights: African Women and US AIDS Policy
  • Women's Health in a Sick World
  • MADRE's Sisters Without Borders: Women's Partnerships for Health and Human Rights

Other News and Views


  • More health workers needed to fight AIDS -experts (Tan Ee Lyn, Reuters)
  • A dollar more for climate change adaptation, a dollar less for health (IRIN News)
  • Security Council Revisits Rape as Tool of War (Nergui Manalsuren, IPS News)
  • Ban leads call for greater efforts to end 'silent war' of sexual violence in conflict (UN News)
  • AIDS Activists Urge Major Funding Push for G-8 (Jim Lobe, IPS News)
  • Global Gag Rule Poses Moral Challenge for U.S. HIV/AIDS Funding (Marjorie Signer, On The Issues Magazine)
  • El Salvador: Lawmakers Against Therapeutic Abortion (Raúl Gutiérrez, IPS News)
  • Africa: Women Say Regional AIDS Plan Falls Short (Nergui Manalsuren, IPS News)
  • What Is a Woman Worth? The Feminization of AIDS (Marcy Bloom, RH Reality Check)

More Women's Health News and Views or General News and Views.

Additional Resources


  • Women’s Health in Nicaragua: The Need for a Secular State (Ana María Pizarro, Interhemispheric Resource Center)
  • Intolerable Killings: Ten years of Abductions and Murders in Ciudad Juárez and Chihuahua (Amnesty International)
  • Murder in Juarez and Beyond (Dannah Baynton, Americas.org)
  • An Empty Sort of Freedom (Houzan Mahmoud, The Guardian)
  • Gender, Health, and Development in the Americas 2003 (Pan American Health Organization)
  • Breaking the Silence: The Global Gag Rule’s Impact on Unsafe Abortion (Center for Reproductive Rights)
  • Anti-Abortion Policies Take Heavy Toll in Africa (Women’s enews)
  • US Foreign Policy Under the Bush Administration (International Women’s Health Coalition)