Guest Post: Elige–Our approaches

Guest post from This guest post is from Cinthya Amanecer Velasco Botello with an introduction by Ellen Gattozi. It’s part of our partnership with the 2010 From Abortion Rights to Social Justice: Building a Movement for Reproductive Freedom Conference–happening this weekend! Jos and Miriam are headed there today and will be blogging from the conference beginning Friday evening.
Cinthya Amanecer Velasco Botello is a social anthropologist at the National School of Anthropology and History specializing in gender and politics. From age 11, Cinthya was part of the Christian youth movement where she worked in the area of young women’s empowerment, and she is currently collaborating with Elige, where she is responsible for overseeing the process of legislation on abortion in Mexico. She is also a member of LG, a group which seeks to promote worthy recreational spaces for young lesbians.
Cinthya will be speaking at the CLPP conference, From Abortion Rights to Social Justice: Building the Movement for Reproductive Freedom, this April on youth organizing in Latina/o communities, abortion access and reproductive rights internationally, and youth rights. Here’s a bit about Elige and their approach to working for reproductive and sexual rights for youth!

Our Approaches
We believe that young people must be the protagonists of our own life condition recognizing our youth, gender to fully exercise our rights from the following approaches:
Feminism
Feminism as a social movement and a theoretical contribution helps us understand that in this world we live differently if you are male or female, and that gender defines the acceptable paths to “be” within a society.
Youth
In our society there are certain privileges, so when we talk about youth we are fighting so that young people are not discriminated against or seen as children or irresponsible just because they are younger.
Youth Empowerment
It is the individual and collective process of self-affirmation in which young people develop our capacity to make decisions about important events in our lives, and to control or change its direction at any given time, using the resources of the environment despite the opposition of other people or institutions.
Sexual and reproductive rights
Sexuality and reproductive capacity through human rights allows us to think of these areas as part of human life from an ethical framework of social bonding based on recognizing a set of social privileges built on the principles of universality, interdependence, limitations, inalienability, indivisibility and comprehensiveness.
Full Citizenship
For citizenship we understand a sense of belonging to the political community, a voluntary membership, governed by a logic of rights and obligations, and with the capacity to make decisions for oneself. For young people, to speak of citizenship implies that we recognize and are publicly recognized with rights as subjects capable of influencing public decisions that affect us.
What do we do?
We in the last 10 years have conducted various activities, both locally, nationally and internationally for the rights of young people. From 2007 our activities are geared around our strategic objectives:
1 .- Broaden decision-making to young people in government to help improve sexual health services and reproductive health.
2 .- Contribute to the strengthening of youth organizations at national and regional levels on issues of feminism and reproductive and sexual rights.
3 .- To contribute to expanding social consciousness about reproductive and sexual rights of youth.
4 .- To strengthen the internal processes of feminist youth participation and mobilization.

Guest Post by Cinthya Amanecer Velasco Botello