My experience at Women Deliver

By Dennis Glasgow, youth volunteer and peer educator at the Guyana Responsible Parenthood Association

In March I was told that I had won a video contest on ‘Talking About Abortion’ that was facilitated by IPPF and the prize was attending an international conference that deals with issues I am particularly passionate about. Luckily for me, Women Deliver was suggested and after doing some research I decided to take the once in a lifetime opportunity to go to Copenhagen, Denmark.

I was asked to speak at two IPPF events at Women Deliver about my experience in Guyana with Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) and it was indeed an honour for me, my organization and my country.

On the first day I gave a presentation at the IPPF Member Association in Denmark called Sex & Samfund (The Danish Family Planning Association) on sexuality education in Guyana where I spoke about what I believe young people need to know about their sexual and reproductive health: ‘’what counts as ‘sex’? , we want to know more about contraceptives, how to use condoms correctly and how to access them, we want to learn about relationships, how our body changes, we want to be told that having sexual urges is normal and tell us ways in which we can deal with it, we want to know more about abortion and finally, I think virginity should be a topic we pay more attention to, especially to the myths around it.” The presentation was well received by participants and we had a very interactive session with the audience afterwards. The Conference officially commenced with an astonishing opening ceremony which saw the participation of thousands of conference delegates who came from all over the world and people who have been working in various areas that promoted Women’s Rights and Gender Equality, Maternal Health and my personal favourites, Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights and Abortion Stigma Reduction. My personal favourite was the “Abortion Stigma Reduction” workshop which was facilitated by Inroads.

I also spoke at the launch of IPPF’s report ‘Everyone’s right to know: delivering comprehensive sexuality education for all young people’ and the best part of the entire experience was being able to be a normal peer educator and volunteer and being afforded with the opportunity to sit and speak alongside Tewodros Melesse, Director General of IPPF, Martin Bille Herrman who is the Danish Secretary of State for Development Policy and Joanna Herat of UNESCO. At the end of the presentations the Minister approached me on his way out and congratulated me for all the work I’ve been doing and shook my hand. He also encouraged me to keep doing what I do, and hearing from him was truly one of the best moments for me at Women Deliver. The Guardian had a representative at the launch and she approached me for an interview and I was like “Why not?” and we spoke about the experiences I had with CSE and eventually it was posted on their website as a podcast.

After the week was over I got to share my experiences with my peers back at the Guyana Responsible Parenthood Association. I got to meet some inspiring people and share my personal story as a young peer educator at the Member Association. I can personally pledge to always stand up for my fellow young people and I will always be an advocate for Comprehensive Sexuality Education to be accessible to all Guyanese youth.

 

Learning about abortion stigma at ‘Women Deliver’

by Viktor Damjanovski, young volunteer at H.E.R.A in Macedonia

Recently, I participated in the global conference “Women Deliver”. Women Deliver is an enormous global advocacy organization that works on fulfilling the 5^th Millennium Development Goal – reducing maternal mortality and improving universal access to reproductive health.

The overall experience of the conference was overwhelming. A mindboggling number of people (over 5000!) from all over the world were attending the conference and being one of those meant a lot. I got to meet lots of peers from around the globe, working on issues similar to mine. I got to hear how young advocates managed to solve these issues and shared ideas on how to resolve those that were not.

I attended a number of sessions which helped me think about abortion stigma. Firstly, an IPPF organized session on the links between abortion and gender based violence (GBV). This session opened my eyes and made me think in ways that I have never done before. The panelists talked about how GBV has direct and indirect influence on abortion and ways we can work on stopping violence against women. I also attended a session called “Tackling Stigma to increase Women’s Abortion Access and Rights”. This session was particularly interesting as NGOs from all around the world talked about how to reduce abortion stigma and how to provide women and girls with proper health care. These issues are something that my organization and I work hard on.

The ‘circles’ of abortion stigma, Inroads

Then the panelists continued to speak about how abortion stigma works: it is a cycle in which we label the women that seek or have had abortions and with those labels come stereotypes, after the stereotypes the general public starts to separate them and with separation comes discrimination. This cycle can be used to furthermore tackle the stigma, since it shows where we can work and what we can do.

 

The same day in the afternoon there was a session in the Youth Zone on busting abortion myths, where a young woman told us about a girl that had an abortion and how she coped with the stress from her religious family. Since I come from a country where religion is institutionalized and where people have been using religion to fight abortion access, this short story really gave me a way to fight back. The quote simply said “I did not kill my child, I simply returned him to God so he can keep him in good hands while I become ready”. The last session that I want to mention is a ‘TED’-style talk by Leslie Cannold in which she talked of a hypothetical situation in which men could get pregnant. She simply said “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament”.

In conclusion, my experience attending this global conference is something that I will never forget. The things that I learned during my time in Copenhagen will be implemented in my work and hopefully someday I may even present that work on another conference like this one. I would like to end this blog with the words of Katja Iversen, the CEO of Women Deliver. She said “the work starts now, and you are the action, you are the change”.