UN office wants to label deaths from ‘unsafe abortion’ as ‘femicide’

(C-Fam) — As the UN carries out a sixteen-day campaign against “gender-based violence,” its Western European regional office proposed a definition of “femicide,” historically understood as the intentional murder of women, usually by men, to include deaths related to “unsafe abortion.”

The term “femicide” dates to 1976, and was coined by feminist activist Diana Russell, but as the UN Western European office notes, the concept has “grown increasingly complex” since then, leading to “a lack of standardization” and “inconsistent definitions across regions and countries.”

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In 2012, the World Health Organization (WHO) wrote that femicide is “generally understood to involve intentional murder of women,” and that this definition is “commonly used in policies, laws and research.”  Nevertheless, they note that some “broader definitions include any killings of women or girls.”

Sex-selective abortion is often included in femicide definitions because it involves the intentional killing of unborn girls specifically because they are female.  However, the idea of including the deaths of women due to abortion complications is more novel—and controversial.

In 2017, the European Institute for Gender Equality surveyed the definitions of rape, femicide, and intimate partner violence across Europe.  It noted that several European countries define deaths resulting from female genital mutilation or “unsafe” abortion as separate crimes, but none of them include these deaths within the definition of femicide.  The only source surveyed that proposed its inclusion was the then-current UN Special Rapporteur on the causes and consequences of violence against women and girls, Rashida Manjoo.

In her 2012 report to the UN General Assembly, Manjoo wrote about “gender-related killings,” also known as femicides, and proposed that “deaths due to poorly conducted or clandestine abortions” are an indirect category of such killings.  Also included were maternal mortality and deaths related to organized crime, drug dealing, and human trafficking.

While the inclusion of deaths from indirect…

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Editor’s Note: Rebecca Oas, Ph.D. writes for C-Fam. This article first appeared in the Friday Fax, an internet report published weekly by C-Fam (Center for Family & Human Rights), a New York and Washington DC-based research institute (https://c-fam.org/). This article appears with permission.

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