Everyone should be able to make decisions about their own body. Every woman and girl has sexual and reproductive rights . This means they are entitled to equal access to health services like contraception and safe abortions, to choose if, when, and who they marry, and to decide if they want to have children and if so how many, when and with who. Women should be able to live without fear of gender-based violence, including rape and other sexual violence, female genital mutilation (FGM), forced marriage, forced pregnancy, forced abortion, or forced sterilization. But there’s a long way to go until all women can enjoy these rights. For example, many women and girls around the world are still unable to access safe and legal abortions. In several countries, people who want or need to end pregnancies are often forced to make an impossible choice: put their lives at risk or go to jail. In Argentina, Amnesty International has campaigned alongside grassroots human rights defenders to change the country’s strict abortion laws. There have been some major steps forward, but women and girls are still being harmed by laws which mean they cannot make choices about their own bodies. We have also campaigned successfully in Ireland and Northern Ireland, where abortion was recently decriminalized after many decades of lobbying by Amnesty and other rights groups.

Intersectional feminism is the idea that all of the reasons someone might be discriminated against, including race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, economic class, and disability, among others, overlap and intersect with each other. One way of understanding this would be to look at how this might apply in a real world setting, such as Dominica, where our research has shown that women sex workers, who are often people of colour, or transgender, or both, suffer torture and persecution by the police.