The Center for Reproductive Rights has a comprehensive, and very worrisome, report on the extent of legal barriers to women’s reproductive healthcare. An obvious problem is laws in heavily Catholic countries that are so absurdly restrictive they prohibit surgical evacuation of a dead fetus, or abortion when a woman’s health is not merely threatened but she is in fact actually going blind, measurably and progressively, from side effects of the pregnancy. Beyond this, though, there is also the systematic efforts of the Catholic Church in Europe to evade local laws on reproductive healthcare rights by convincing governments to sign “concordats” stipulating restrictions on, or the right to impose restrictions on, healthcare rights and especially women’s reproductive autonomy, entirely outside the existing legal framework of the EU or the individual nation. Luckily, the EU has been taking a look at these developments, and there are some encouraging signs.
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