Female Activism Brought Emergency Contraception
Shortly after the news that emergency contraception was to be allowed in public health services, a predicted cry of opposition arose from one of the most influential entities in Mexico: the Catholic Church. As the government and church battled over the issue, however, women, the group directly affected by the debate, proved to be the deciding voice. Not only did women support the measure, but many had fought for its inclusion, with women’s health organizations conducting reproductive health educational programs years before emergency contraception became a national issue. The expansion of reproductive health education to women in Mexico proves a substantial victory, then, and not least in that it illustrates the rising power of female activists across the globe.
How Women Took Charge
By 2003, a large majority of Latin American countries had included emergency contraception in their government’s family planning programs. In 2004, the Mexican Ministry of Health announced the addition of emergency contraception, or “EC,” to reproductive health services as part of a national healthcare reform. “There was a special priority given to women’s health because we realized that women were at a special disadvantage in obtaining health services,” Julio Frenk, Dean of the Harvard School of Public Health and Mexico’s Minister of Health at the time of the reform, explained to the HPR. “Within that, reproductive health was equally important, and within that emergency contraception emerged as one of the areas of vital concerns in family services.”
Well before Frenk’s decision, however, women had been campaigning for EC. Frenk pointed out that “the whole emergency contraception initiative to expand family planning services that were being offered was actually started by folks in general society groups, mostly women’s groups that were demanding that service.” During the previous decade, groups including CDD, GIRE, and Equidad de Género, along with other NGOs, had began an educational campaign to raise awareness among potential users of EC, the general public, and other stakeholder groups such as doctors and schools. Sandra Garcia, director of the Population Council in Mexico, pointed out that during the late 1990s, the Population Council and other organizations came together to “sponsor a free informational hotline and post-card campaign.” An article in Global Public Health by Dr. Raffaela Schiavon and Elizabeth Westley details the effort, noting that “the partners [Mexican Emergency Contraception Consortium] worked with an advertising agency to develop a humorous series of [emergency contraception] postcards, distributed for free through racks in restaurants, bars, gyms, and so on.” This proactive educational campaign by women’s organizations and research facilities provided women a foundation with which to demand the addition of emergency contraception into public health services.
Between Devotion and Reproduction
The group that presented a major challenge to expanding emergency contraception was the Catholic Church. Reproductive health education might have proved a wedge that steered women away from the religious beliefs of their community. The church asserted the connection between emergency contraception and abortion, but Frenk described a Ministry of Health educational campaign to explain that “even though the church’s position was very respectable, scientific evidence indicated the opposite because this was a method that interfered with conception.” The public effort helped override the influence of the Catholic Church on personal reproductive decisions.
Assisting the effort, many women seemed to frame emergency contraception as an issue of women’s rights rather than a religious issue. Maria Consuelo Mejia, executive director of Mexico’s Catholic Women for the Right to Choose, told the HPR that “more than 90 percent of Catholics, according to a survey we made, think that EC must be provided to women who had an unprotected sexual relationship and to women subject to sexual violence.” Perhaps more importantly, Blanchard explained, Mexico needs “to reinforce the fact that policies are made for all faiths; the idea that any particular policy will be tied to one religious base marginalizes people of other religious faiths. Arguments have been made that this is not a religious issue but a women’s rights issue.”
The Women Left Behind
Even though the introduction of emergency contraception to national family planning services has expanded access, there remains work ahead. To start, some groups of women, especially adolescent girls, still have an unmet need for contraceptive education. To remedy this problem, Carlos Indacochea, professor at George Washington University, calls for an “abundance of services and a lot of education, and not only through the form of the educational system. You really have to go where adolescents are at the margins and communicate with them there. Peer education is very effective.” Blanchard echoes this view, indicating that significant portions of at risk women are not in the education system, meaning, “we need a range of strategies that are useful for different people, like the internet, paper materials, hotlines, and programs that focus on getting parents to talk to their children.”
Future campaigns might model themselves after the emergency contraception’s appeal to a wide audience. According to Kelly Blanchard, President of Ibis Reproductive Health, the inclusion of various stakeholders assisted the prior contraceptive efforts. As Blanchard told the HPR, “The current policies are the result of years of political advocacy and the work of a number of organizations. There were a lot of stakeholders-political groups, women’s rights advocates, physicians, non-profits-who shared information about the health benefits of birth control and abortion programs and about arguments for women’s rights. It was a really long process, but this alliance between different groups is what made the campaign successful.”
The Road Ahead
The knowledge fostered by the government, NGOs, and women’s health organizations during the campaign to include emergency contraception in public health services will have a permanent impact on the future of reproductive health services in Mexico. “I think it is irreversible,” comments Frenk. Indacochea offered a similar opinion arguing that, “once women know [about contraception] and know they can have access to it, it is very difficult to deny it to them.” Nonetheless, Indacochea warns that the future of reproductive health services in Mexico are by no means certain, and urges that funding for reproductive health services, currently done by the states, should go back into the hands of the federal government. Both Frenk and Indacochea voiced concerns that conservative state governments may attempt to restrict access to emergency contraception. Garcia concurred that, though she has faith for the future of reproductive health services, she fears that Mexico may get in a complacent position with the work done so far and shift focus to other national issues. While the political fights to be fought in the future are unclear, it is certain that access to reproductive health education will continue to shape the way Mexican women utilize and access reproductive health services.