Demanding Abortion Access for Women Raped in War

Hi. I’m in a bit of a pickle here.

The U.S. denies abortion services for war rape victims, but no one seems to care. President Obama could single-handedly change this policy…but no one seems to care. The organization I work for is trying to bring attention to all of this……but nobody seems to care…yet.

The how and why of all this will make sense in a second, I promise. But before I go about explaining everything I want to make one thing clear: I am writing out of desperation. Obviously, like the rest of us that understand a woman’s right to choose, I am desperate for a modicum of justice for these women and girls. And for this reason I am also desperate for a favor—I am desperate for you to sign a petition to force President Obama to explain to us why he hasn’t fixed George W. Bush’s policy denying abortions to war rape victims.

Let me back up. The nuts and bolts of it are this: in 1973 Congress passed the Helms Amendment, a law saying that American foreign aid could not be used to “fund abortions as a method of family planning.” Now—“abortion as a method of family planning”—has always been understood to mean that abortions are permitted where the woman’s life is at risk, or where her pregnancy is the result of rape or incest. Or it was, until George W. Bush became president and his administration formally reinterpreted the phrase to mean “no abortions for anyone, ever.”

Obama, for some reason, has allowed this interpretation to remain in place.

That means that rape doesn’t matter; age of the victim doesn’t matter; it doesn’t matter that denying abortions for rape victims is actual torture, or that the U.S.’s policy violates international law. If you are a woman and you show up to an overseas clinic funded by U.S., you are not getting an abortion.

Even more upsetting than the policy itself, is how it shakes out in practice. For one thing, the U.S. is by far the largest humanitarian aid donor in the world. The billions of dollars the U.S. gives in aid every year finds its way into the budgets of almost every single group providing services for war victims. While a good thing in one sense, this is bad in another: because U.S. money is everywhere, there is nowhere you can get an abortion.

Another layer on top of all of this is the fact that pregnancies are dangerous, especially during war. Every day 800 women die from complications during pregnancy or childbirth—and this is a global number, the figures are much higher during war where medical services are not available, where young girls’ bodies struggle to cope with pregnancy (girls under 18 are often targets of conflict-related rape) and where rape is often unthinkably brutal.

Finally, it is not as if I’m creating a boogie man here; war rape is a very real problem. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo or DRC, eleven hundred women are raped every day—that’s 48 women raped every hour. During the Rwandan genocide somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000 women were raped in 100 days. ISIS has an explicit policy of sexual slavery and rape reserved for the women and girls it captures.

Still, Obama hasn’t acted to change this policy.

Which brings me again to my point: a petition. The (very small) non-profit I work for (we’re 10 people) has a campaign designed to make sure these women and girls can access abortions services as a matter of right. We’ve definitely had big successes, but we’ve also had big frustrations—Obama’s failure to take action on the Helms Amendment being one of them. Despite the fact that President Obama has issued more executive actions than any other president (556), and despite the fact that’s literally all that’s needed to make sure war rape victims get all the medical care they’re entitled to, and despite the fact that Obama is a self-described feminist—he won’t issue executive order number 557 to help women and girls around the world.

To try to hold him accountable for all of this, my non-profit (the Global Justice Center) started a “We the People” petition with the White House to force Obama to answer for his inaction. If you don’t know what a “We the People” petition is (don’t worry, neither did I), it’s pretty simple: if you write a petition that gets 100,000 signatures in 30 days, the President will respond to whatever it is that your petition says.

Our petition asks President Obama to lift the abortion restrictions attached to the Helms Amendment that deny services to victims of war rape. It expires on September 11th (I know…) and we are woefully short of the 100,000 mark.

So, reader, please sign the Petition. (And if I’m really being honest: please sign it, tweet it, print it out and post it on your front door, recite it on the subway, and otherwise get the word out.) Don’t let Obama get away with not answering a public question about a globally stigmatized issue because we didn’t get enough e-signatures.

Maybe we can all breathe a collective sigh of relief when Hillary wins the presidency. But what better way of standing with her than to force Obama to stand with the hers he’s ignored since he arrived in office?