Local Groups activity pack February 2015 - Valentine's Day
Raise awareness about sexual and reproductive rights with these funny Valentine’s Day cards.
Show your love for that special person in your life with proper, legalistic human rights language! Sometimes it’s difficult to express your feelings for that special person and we at Amnesty think that inscrutable language of official human rights documents can help…
But seriously now.
One of the aims of the My Body My Rights campaign is to establish sexual and reproductive rights as human rights. All over the world, people are coerced, criminalised and discriminated against, simply for making choices about their bodies and their lives.
Sexuality and childbearing are sensitive issues and many people find them difficult to talk about in public. They are deeply personal experiences, yet families and communities, states and religious bodies, often seek to control people’s sexual and reproductive lives – and the lives of women and girls in particular.
The freedom to make decisions about your own health, body, sexual life and identity is a fundamental human right. Such decisions are important and may be difficult, so to reach them people may need support, information and health services. But the power to decide must remain with the person most directly concerned.
But rather than see these issues as fundamental human rights issues, they are often talked about in terms of culture, modesty, shame and honour. Internationally, this is the area where gender equality is suffering the greatest backlash and where human rights defenders are facing some of the biggest threats. Conservative and religious forces are working to delete reference to sexual and reproductive rights in international documents and agreements.