Current campaigns

Global Campaigns
UK Campaigns

---

Marie Stopes International (MSI) campaigns on global and UK issues.

Global campaigns:

1. Sex Positions

The MSI Partnership, in collaboration with Interact Worldwide, has launched a campaign to put pressure on the UK government to take the lead in ensuring that the international donor community fulfils promises made a decade ago to support global efforts to achieve sexual and reproductive health and rights for all by 2015; and to lead opposition to those political and ideological forces in the USA, Europe and elsewhere that are actively seeking to undermine and even reverse progress made in the last decade.

Members of the UK public are being asked to take part in our Sex Positions campaign by sending their MPs a special postcard. As your elected representative, your MP is duty bound to respond to your request and take action on your behalf. Your involvement is crucial to the success of the campaign and can contribute to efforts to end the dreadful waste of human lives, which every year sees over 500,000 women from the developing world die unnecessarily, simply as a result of being pregnant.

“Women are not dying because of diseases we cannot treat… they are dying because societies have yet to make the decision that their lives are worth saving.” Dr Mahmoud Fathalla, Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Assiut University, Egypt.

If you believe their lives are worth saving, order our action pack today and ask your MP: Sex: What position will you adopt?

Click here to download a special 28 page supplement on these issues, Dying to have a baby? which appeared in the Sunday 10 October edition of The Observer.

Click here to download our special action pack Sex: what position will you adopt?, which provides all the information you need to mobilise your MP, and here to download the Sex: what position will you adopt? Postcard for MPs .

Or to order a printed copy telephone: 020 7574 7421. The printed pack contains a postcard for you to send to your MP asking: Sex: what position will you adopt? Please allow 14 days for delivery of printed packs.

Click here to find out about other ways you can get involved in the campaign.

2. Overturning the Global Gag Rule
MSI is committed to overturning the US Government's Mexico City Policy (also known as the Global Gag Rule), which was reintroduced by the Bush Administration in January 2001. The policy prevents any USAID money going to family planning agencies who provide or promote abortion, or even give abortion information in counselling sessions.

The policy has resulted in the loss of more than million to MSI in Africa, leading to the closure of three clinics in Kenya, an outreach programme serving poor communities in Ethiopia and further centres in Tanzania.

Africa's poorest will suffer as USA's Mexico City Policy forces family planning clinics to close
10.9.01

3. Keeping reproductive health on the agenda
MSI welcomes initiatives by the UK and the European community including the Global Health Fund to address the world's three most prevalent communicable diseases - HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria. However, MSI wants to ensure that the focus and donor funding does not shift away from reproductive health. Family planning remains a basic human right, and the lack of it already results in 600,000 needless deaths a year from pregnancy-related causes.

MSI will fight to keep reproductive health high on the health, development and human rights agenda.

4. Securing reproductive health supplies
MSI is working with the international community to ensure the long-term supply of contraceptives. Worldwide, there are at least 350 million women who want, but do not have, access to modern methods of contraception. That number will continue to increase as the world's population increases in size and a huge cohort of young people become sexually active.

UK campaigns:

1. Easy access to emergency contraception
MSI believes that easy access to emergency hormonal contraception is vital. MSI is campaigning for the continuation of over-the-counter provision in pharmacies and would like to see the scheme developed, with a reduction in cost and ease of access for young people.

2. Voice for choice campaign
MSI believes the UK should fall into line with the rest of Europe and make abortion available on request in the first trimester (up to 14 weeks). At the moment women still have to secure the approval of two doctors before they can access an abortion. This is key to the Voice for Choice campaign, of which MSI is a member. It also calls for only one doctor's approval for abortions from 15-24 weeks; doctors to declare any conscientious objection to abortion; extension of this amended Act to Northern Ireland, and the NHS to provide sufficient abortion services to cover local needs - ending the current postcode lottery. For more information visit www.vfc.mailbox.co.uk

3. Sex education
MSI campaigns for early sex education to reduce the UK's high rates of teenage pregnancy. In line with the Government's strategy to halve the rate of pregnancy in the under-18s by 2010, MSI is producing publications and interactive multi-media materials to educate young people about sex before they become sexually active. MSI is also committed to protecting this vulnerable age group against sexually transmitted infections that can lead to long-term infertility.

Please click here to view the Sexplanations publication.
[PDF File - 185KB]

www.likeitis.org.uk is a sexual health website specifically aimed at the 11-15 age group, produced by Marie Stopes International and launched by Geri Halliwell (UNFPA Goodwill ambassador assigned to Marie Stopes International)