Project overview: Immeasurable experiences from India

Supriya Singh and Rahul Tiwari, Youth Champions of the Youth and Abortion Stigma Project with the Family Planning Association India (FPAI), share with us their experiences, challenges and learnings from this project.

From India: Challenges during the COVID-19 Crisis

By Supriya Singh, Youth Champion, India.

At the beginning of the year 2020, The Abortion Stigma project of Packard Foundation was going well. The peer educators, link workers, Project Coordinator and Youth Champions were working effectively in the community. But the pandemic brought our lives to a standstill and we could barely manage to do any work due to the government imposed lockdown in the months of March to June 2020.

India’s Silent Spiritual Leaders

By Rahul Tiwari, Youth Champion, India

India is a secular country like no other when it comes to the demographic composition. We have multiple religions and languages, but the thing that unites us all is our culture.

Religious leaders do not determine public policy. Neither should they. But they are important and powerful agents of change. They can nudge people to behave in more responsible ways or into following long-standing traditions.

Working with Pharmacists in Murhu and Lucknow City

By Supriya Singh and Rahul Tiwari, Youth Champions, India.

Abortion Stigma affects women and girls, abortion providers, reproductive rights advocates and communities. Stigmatization is a deeply contextual, dynamic social process; stigma from abortion is the discrediting of individuals as a result of their association with abortion.

We have been active as Champions of the Abortion stigma project since the end of 2018,  in two areas of Lucknow city (Uttar Pradesh): Faizullaganj (peri-urban) and Bakshi ka Talab (rural).

Experiences of peer educators in Murhu, India

Two young people, involved with IPPF’s youth and abortion stigma project in India, write about their experiences of sharing information in their local community. This post is reproduced from the FPA India blogsite.

Abortion – a human right

by Arshpreet Kaur, young volunteer at the Family Planning Association of India

Each year, around the world, 19-20 million women undergo unsafe abortions [Source: WHO]. Although the law in India permits safe abortion under certain conditions, here one woman dies every two hours of an unsafe abortion [Source: TIME]. The root cause for this alarming statistic is stigma around abortion and the lack of awareness about sexual and reproductive health and rights.