“Kesetaraan gender yang sesungguhnya tidak akan terjadi selama perempuan tidak mendapat akses aborsi yang aman dan legal”.

Kalimat diatas merupakan potongan dari pembukaan Airlie Declaration, sebuah deklarasi yang disepakati tanggal 25 Maret 2014 lalu pada pertemuan di Airlie Center, Virginia Amerika Serikat. Perumusan Deklarasi Airlie tersebut ditandatangani oleh organisasi-organisasi dan para tokoh yang bergerak di isu kesehatan reproduksi, termasuk aborsi aman dan legal dari berbagai negara, diantaranya Elizabeth Maguire (Presiden dan CEO IPAS, Amerika Serikat), Hon. Nana Oye Lithur (Menteri Perlindungan Anak, Gender dan Sosial, Ghana), Beatriz Galli (Penasehat senior IPAS, Brazil), Kenneth Keng (Direktur Advokasi Kesehatan Reproduksi, Filipina) dan Inna Hudaya, pendiri sekaligus direktur Samsara, Indonesia.

By Sara Barnes

Hello again! Another week gone by and we’re in the beautiful Togian Region of Central Sulawesi, but let me catch you up on what’s gone on between our last update and here.

We arrived in Gorontalo late on Sunday night and collapsed, Monday saw us settling in and making plans for the 4 or 5 days we had in the city. Yulya, a friend of our Samsara supporter’s in Manado , kindly offered to host Tia and Sara at her house. After chatting to yulya and some of her friends, university students in Gorontalo, we started to get a better idea of the challenges Gorontalo faced. As they told it the city was wrapped up in politics, with almost every activist for almost every cause aligned to one political party or another. The youth we spoke to felt like this distraceted from the actual causes as the political parties always ended up pushing their agenda over the cause they were trying to help. We had struggled to find women’s groups or NGOs to get in touch with in Gorontalo and wondered if this might be the reason for it. Out of this the group we chatted with agree that they would all like to learn more about Sexual Reproductive Health and Rights, and specifically unplanned pregnancy and teenage pregnancy. Yulya helped us organise a workshop at her house with about 15 women and men in their twenties for Tuesday evening.