“It was the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti in the Caribbean and is Roman Catholic, that stood up the tallest for the right of women and girls to have access to sexual reproductive health services,” reports Blue Pass, an online portal that covers the United Nations.
Blue Pass recently reported on the difficulties in getting the 15-member United Nations Security Council to issue a (nonbinding) resolution calling for prosecuting cases of sexual violence in conflict.
The online portal mentions that special envoy of President Danilo Medina at the Security Council, José Singer Weisinger, called access to sexual reproductive health services “non-negotiable” and that to refuse it is “tantamount to degrading cruel and inhuman treatment and greater suffering” to women.
President Danilo Medina on two occasions has vetoed proposed changes in the Dominican Penal Code, backed by the Catholic Church, to completely ban abortion in the Dominican Republic. Some speculate that this is one of the reasons the Catholic Church is now pressuring the government, equating it to a dictatorship, perhaps to get the President to abandon his support for exceptions to the abortion ban in the Penal Code.
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Diario Libre
30 April 2019