Someone Tell the State Department that Reproductive Rights are Human Rights

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Last year, the Trump-Pence administration removed information on reproductive health and rights from the State Department’s annual Human Rights Reports, effectively communicating that reproductive rights are not human rights. Stephanie Schmid with the Center for Reproductive Rights talks to us about the removal of reproductive health and rights information from the annual Human Rights Reports and what that means for SRHR around the world.

The Human Rights Reports are annual, Congressionally-required reports on human rights practices in approximately 200 UN-member countries as well as countries that receive U.S. foreign assistance around the world. They have been around for almost 50 years, and have reported on reproductive rights since the 1990’s. The reports are used by every branch of the U.S. government.

Since 2011, there has been a separate reproductive rights sub-section of the Human Rights Reports, which was entirely deleted last year by the Trump administration. In Oxfam’s Sins of Omission report, it was concluded that there was a 20% reduction in the reporting on gender-based and sexual violence and a 30% reduction on reporting on LGBTQ rights around the world. Even if the deletion of the sub-section were to be immediately reversed, this has drastically impacted the ability for State Department officials in other countries to collect the reproductive rights data and information we need.

Reproductive rights will not be in this year’s Human Rights Reports, either.

It isn’t all bad news, though! On March 8th, 2019, 158 members of Congress introduced the Reproductive Rights are Human Rights Act. This bill would reinstate information on reproductive health and rights in the State Department’s annual reports.

Links from this episode

Center for Reproductive Rights
Center for Reproductive Rights on Facebook
Center for Reproductive Rights on Twitter
Oxfam Sins of Omission Report
Reproductive Rights Are Human Rights Act in the House
Reproductive Rights Are Human Rights Act in the Senate
Hillary Clinton’s Tweet Thread on the Reproductive Rights Are Human Rights Act

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Transcript

Jennie: Welcome to rePROs Fight Back a podcast on all things repro. I'm your host Jennie Wetter. In each episode I'll be taking you to the front lines of the escalating fight over our sexual and reproductive health and rights at home and abroad. Each episode I'll be speaking with leaders who are fighting to protect our reproductive health and rights to ensure that no one's reproductive health depends on where they live. It's time for repros to fight back. Read More

Jennie: Welcome to rePROs Fight Back. So we know reproductive rights are clearly under attack by the Trump administration. And last year you may have heard that they removed reproductive rights from their annual human rights reports that are put out by the State Department, clearly showing that they do not think reproductive rights are human rights. So today we're going to dig into this and I'm really looking forward to having a great conversation with Stephanie Schmid from the Center for Reproductive Rights to talk to us about the State Department human rights reports and the changes around reproductive rights. Jennie: Hey Stephanie, thanks for being here today. Stephanie: Hey Jennie. Jennie: Um, well first of all, tell us a little bit about yourself cause you have particularly relevant background to this.

Stephanie: Sure. So up until last May of 2018 I was a foreign service officer with the Department of State and basically what that means is for seven years I served in posts overseas including Port-au-Prince, Haiti and in Washington, DC including in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, which is tasked with preparing these annual reports. And so I've seen them go from start to finish. I've helped draft them, I've done research, I've done editing and last year I had a front row seat to the deletions of the reproductive rights subsection. So because I thought that was super awful and because I didn't particularly enjoy representing an administration that stands for a bunch of things that I am fundamentally against, I tendered my resignation in May and joined the amazing Center for Reproductive Rights to lead their US foreign policy advocacy program,which is great because now we get to work with you in coalitions all the time. Jennie: It's pretty awesome. Okay. Before we get into what happened, and we should probably start at the beginning with what are the human rights reports? Stephanie: Absolutely. So the human rights reports have been around for almost 50 years. They are mandated through a bill called the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, although the recognition of human rights and the creation of these reports didn't come about until the mid 1970s. And so basically Congress requires the State Department to prepare an annual report. It's called the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. And it covers approximately 200 countries around the world. Both those receiving US foreign assistance and UN member states. And it documents everything from um, torture and violations of, um, a number of international human rights. And since about the mid 1990s, these reports have included, uh, reporting on reproductive rights as we know them today in various forms. And we can talk more about that in the future.

Jennie: Uh, we talked a little bit about what's in them, um, but why are they important? Stephanie: So they're super important for a lot of reasons. Some people think, okay, the State Department, the roles, this report is up on its website and then it just sits there. Absolutely not. The reports are used by every branch of the US government. Um, including, uh, subbranches that you wouldn't think about like the Export Import Bank who's making decisions about what sorts of loans to make. And they'll take a look at the human rights reports to assess the situation in a given country and determine whether or not that loan is inappropriate investment or, um, particularly important. Right now I think as we look to what's happening, uh, on the US southern border, these reports are used by immigration judges and asylum officers in adjudicating people's claims for asylum or refugee status. And basically they use the human rights reports as a foundation for assessing the credibility of what an applicant is saying about what's happening in their country and why they're seeking asylum or refugee status. So if something isn't in the human rights report, then it's usually not found to be a valid basis for a claim. Jennie: Uh, yeah. You know, and never thought about the bank before. Like that just is not one of the uses that occurred to me. Stephanie: You know, it's, it's really interesting because everybody knows, you know, Congress uses these reports. It's why they mandate them to determine foreign assistance. But it's really the sort of foundational US government document for assessing the human rights situation in all these countries. And then because a lot of other countries don't have this kind of footprint on the ground to do this data gathering, the reports are also used by other countries. They're used by researchers and academics by journalists. And I think, um, another really important use is human rights defenders on the ground in countries that we're reporting on. So my colleagues in, um, for example, the Latin America and Caribbean team have frequently talked about how advocates in El Salvador, which one of like, one of the harshest, uh, anti-abortion laws that we see around the world, they use those human rights reports to advocate for change in their countries as a baseline for documentation and they can be extremely helpful to those advocates. Jennie: Yeah, it's interesting cause it is so important to non-government organizations and other people to hold countries accountable and you know, enables people who, like you said, don't have the footprint in country to like look at the full range of human rights violations that may be happening in a country. Stephanie: Absolutely. Jennie: Okay. So how did reproductive rights become covered in them? Stephanie: Yeah, so as I was saying, going all the way back to the mid 1990s when we have former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in her capacity as first lady speaking at the Beijing Conference on Women saying women's rights are human rights and human rights or women's rights, there started to be a recognition there that this was something that needed to be included in the reports. Reproductive rights are of course an integral part of women's human rights and humanity and girl's human rights and humanity and anybody that can become pregnant or have to make a reproductive healthcare decision. Right. So, um, those rights are kind of as they are in the US context grounded in a number of international human rights law principles including the right to life, the right to health care, the right to information, the right to privacy, the right to freedom of expression. So they've been, they're well grounded in international human rights law. And so there was prior reporting, uh, that varied across countries depending on circumstance dating to the mid nineties. But then beginning with the 2011 reports under Secretary of State Clinton and her ambassador at large for global women's issues, we saw the institution of a separate subsection specifically dedicated to talking about reproductive rights and we're talking about access to maternal health care, access to contraception. What type of contraception do you have access to? Is there an unmet need in this country that isn't being fulfilled? Um, access to pre and postnatal care, access to safe abortion, access to post abortion care. There are countries where, um, women will literally go and seek assistance after having an unsafe abortion in a healthcare setting and be refused that care because of healthcare providers. Fears about being prosecuted under those countries, abortion laws, uh, where it is criminalized and those women literally die. Um, and so the collection of data on why women are dying in childbirth, why women are dying after having unsafe abortions is really important. And we call that maternal mortality and maternal morbidity statistics. And it's even more important now under the Trump administration because as you and your listeners know, we're dealing with a drastically expanded global gag rule, which we know from previous smaller iterations of the gag rule under Reagan, Bush and Bush, um, drive up the rates of unsafe abortion because women are going to seek abortions whether or not it's illegal and whether or not they have access to them, uh, safely. And then that leads to a spike in maternal deaths. So one of the things we're particularly interested in seeing and reporting like in the human rights reports is what are those rates of unsafe abortions? What are those rates of maternal mortality and how do they change when Republican administrations implement horrific policies like the global gag rule? Jennie: Yeah. It's such a wide breadth of things to keep track of. But so important to the women living in that country. Stephanie: Absolutely. Reproductive rights are a baseline for women's human rights because while it may be sexier to talk about economic empowerment or political access, the reality is that a woman or a girl is not going to be able to continue their education, is not going to be able to seek employment, is not going to be able to participate in the political sphere unless they have the fundamental right to choose when and how to have children, when and how to become pregnant, when and how to give birth and what kind of care they want to access. And all of that requires having this information and data that understand if those rights are actually available in reality on the ground. Because we know even in countries that have decent laws and systems, the issue of access is critical. We see that in the United States. So we want data here to see if rights are being realized. Jennie: So I think we might've alluded to this a little bit in one of your examples earlier, but how have they been used with other parts of the government? Um, reproductive rights in particular as part of the human rights report? Stephanie: Yeah, so I think we were saying since 2011 there's been this separate reproductive rights subsection and then last year that section was completely deleted by the Trump administration. And we think that it was a concerted plan of attack, part of their broader attack on sexual and reproductive health and rights that we're seeing across the board, both domestically and globally.The global gag rule, the domestic gag rule. And um, that is a real concern to us. Um, and I also want to emphasize here that even if this deletion were to be reversed immediately, the ability of US government officials with the State Department on the ground in these countries to collect that information has been drastically hampered. Uh, those relationships that you build, the meetings that you attend, the groups that you have connections with, all of that gets lost because we know that the 2018 reports which are about to drop are also being prepared without reproductive rights in them. So now it's two years of lost data, lost relationships, and a complete lack of promotion of these values. And rights on the ground. Jennie: What did the report look like last year? Stephanie: So they kept something that I guess could be considered reproductive related, but it was definitely not what was in their report before. Let me give you an example of one country because I think it will illustrate for your viewers, your listeners what, what happened. Let's talk about El Salvador and you can go on the State Department website and very easily and look at these reports country by country, year by year. So, um, I encourage folks to do that. But in El Salvador, so the 2016 report, which was released in 2017, there's always that delay, had a lengthy discussion of a number of reproductive health care issues, including a group of women that have been sentenced to prison for essentially miscarrying. And those women are serving sentences upwards of 30 or 40 years. And the CRR is very proud to represent a number of them in court and happy to say that three of them were released from prison just yesterday and had their sentences commuted. Although all those women had served seven, eight, nine, 10 years in prison already. So, um, huge rights violations there obviously. But the 2016 reports, uh, clearly talked about the situation of these women, the violations of their human rights for being jailed for essentially seeking care from state hospitals after suffering miscarriages. The 2017 reports for El Salvador is simply say there are no reports of course, of population control measures in El Salvador. If you would like information on maternal mortality and contraception go to this link. So a couple of things there. One, the link that they site two is invalid, doesn't work, has zero information on contraception, superior nice and has um, data on maternal mortality. That is from 2015 so it's old and it's based on statistical modeling, not actual incidences of maternal mortality and country. So it's worthless. Um, and why does it say there are no practices? There are no incidences of course, population control. Well that's because the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 was amended many years ago to require reporting specifically on this idea of population control. And what that that refers to is forced sterilization or forced abortion. Obviously those are um, a small part of reproductive rights, ones that we are all concerned about and happy that the State Department's reporting on. But folks should understand that those situations are really few. I'm, we're talking about a limited number of countries, countries like North Korea and China that have population control, you know, practices. So for the vast majority of the 195 countries being reported on in 2017, all you're gonna see is that one little line that says there's no evidence of a coherence of population control, um, methods being practiced in El Salvador, in the Philippines, et cetera. And so essentially what the Trump administration did was delete all of that comprehensive reporting on all of those reproductive rights that we talked about except for coercive population control because they're required explicitly to do so by Congress.

Jennie: I mean for them it's the story they want to tell, right? Like they want to talk about the quote unquote pro-life story of countries doing forced abortions or sterilizations and not actually talk about things that are happening in country, which are preventing women from exerting control over their own bodies. Stephanie: Absolutely. And as I heard Senators Menendez and Blumenthal say yesterday at a press conference we had about a bill that's being introduced that we're going to talk about in a bit, what is this administration afraid of? Why do they not want to put all the information on what's happening in these countries in the reports? Who does that benefit? Dictators were oppressive regimes and a terroristic anti-choice antiabortion movement in this country that's funded by a small group of very vocal, angry people who control both the anti-choice movement in this country and fund the anti choice movement around the world. So the vast majority of citizens, both in the United States and globally would clearly benefit from having access to full and comprehensive reporting on a panoply of human rights, including reproductive rights. So this censorship, this gagging of information makes absolutely no sense. And then as I said earlier, I think they are actually actively trying to hide data that would demonstrate that their own global gag rule is having a severe impact on the ground. Because what is the point of the global gag rule? Allegedly it is to reduce abortion supposedly, supposedly. But what do we know about the global gag rule? And every intance taken is always increased abortion. And with increased unsafe abortion, we have increased maternal deaths. So if the human rights reports aren't reporting on either increased unsafe abortion or increased maternal deaths, then we do not have any US government data on the impact of the global gag rule on the ground. So they can pretend that their policy is not killing women, when in fact we know that it's killing women and taking mothers away from children. Happy Friday. Uh, so also what, so we're losing this information. So let's now say someone from, and I think El Salvador is like the clear, clearest example where to make this a story, someone from El Salvador tries to seek asylum in the US um, I would like to refer all your listeners to as 10 tweet thread that Secretary Clinton did today on this very topic. I'm talking about what would happen for a woman to come here. So in this not hypothetical, this real situation, you have a woman who lets, let's say she's a young woman, she's 14 years old, she is sexually assaulted, she becomes pregnant, she knows in El Salvador that she cannot seek an abortion legally in her country. Um, just she has an unsafe abortion. Does she miscarry? Let's see. Either of those things could happen, right? And then she is in a position where she knows there are literally tens of women serving 30 and 40 year prison sentences for seeking health care in that exact situation, seeking basic fundamental healthcare services so that they don't die. So what does she do? She leaves her country. She seeks a better life in America and she makes a claim for asylum or for refugee status, usually it would be asylum at the border. Um, and says I live in a country with extremely high rates of sexual and gender based violence that is perpetrated by armed gangs, sometimes acting in a sort of paramilitary or pseudo state purpose. I as a victim of sexual violence, could not seek, uh, an abortion because it's illegal in my country. I came here because I suffered a miscarriage and I fear prosecution if I returned to my country for, um, for that. And here are all these women who are in jail right now because of similar circumstances to mine. Well, in 2016 or 2015 or 2014 if she had come to the United States one, she wouldn't have been treated the way she is because Donald Trump wasn't president. Barack Obama was, and you could actually seek asylum at our border as is your legal right. Um, but to the immigration judge or asylum offer officer who's adjudicating that claim would open up the 2015 or 2016 human rights reports from the State Department, turn to the El Salvador chapter and see this extensive reporting on sexual and gender based violence in El Salvador in the reproductive rights subsection. And he would say, okay, this makes sense to me. You've presented a credible claim. Now what happens today? You open up that same country report, you see absolutely nothing on reproductive rights except this one fake sentence about coercive population control, which is such a dated term and so misogynistic. So the judge could reasonably say I don't see any evidence in this US government report, which I rely on. And in fact, sexual and gender based violence reporting was drastically diminished last year. So you couldn't even try to rely on that reporting. Absent the reproductive rights section, I do not find you to be credible and I am returning you to your country of origin claim denied.

Jennie: That is heartbreaking. And we know that's probably happening. So you said, um, that the sexual and gender based violence section was also affected. Was there anything else that was taken out?

Stephanie: Yeah, so reproductive rates is the clearest elimination, right, because you are talking about an entire sub-section that's deleted across the board. Um, but there was also, and for folks who are interested, I would refer you to an Oxfam report issued this past November called Sins of Omission that's available on their website. Oxfam documented that across the board there's a 20% reduction in reporting on sexual and gender based violence and women's issues more broadly. And there's upwards of 30%, uh, diminished reporting on LGBTQ rights around the world, particularly when it comes to issues like, uh, the fight to legalize gay marriage in other countries and Australia is a good example of that. They were having, you know, a massive debate in country about the legalization of gay marriage and all that reporting was eliminated. And of course across the board, what all branches of the Trump administration are doing is reducing data collection. Whether we're talking about the Environmental Protection Agency or HHS, they're getting rid of data. They don't like statistics. They want one illustrative example, which in the context of the human rights reports renders things meaningless, right? Because you can't make arguments based on one illustrative example. The whole point is the data collection. Um, so that's, that's what happened. Um, I think one of the reasons that there wasn't wholesale deletion of other sections is that there were career officials within the Department of State, particularly within the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, who felt, um, empowered to push back on attempted cuts by at the time then Secretary of State, Tillerson and his staff in the policy planning department and say, no, we need to report on LGBT rights. We need to report on sexual and gender based violence. They'll a little less there and we'll get to that in a second. And also disability rights was something that was on the chopping block. All of these things appear in section six of the human rights reports. Um, but because this administration has sort of decimated what's called the Secretary's Office of Global Women's Issues and really deprioritized staffing and expertise on women's rights issues, um, there was less pushback on sexual and gender based violence and on reproductive rights cutting because there are no senior people left at the Department of State in a career capacity working on those issues. And up until yesterday, there had been no political appointees, uh, working in the Secretary's Office for Global Women's issues. Um, just yesterday we found out that President Trump has decided to nominate, um, someone to serve as ambassador at large for global women's issues. So, um, we will see if that situation changes though I highly doubt anyone nominated by a president who clearly hates women and thinks that they are unworthy of any rights, let alone sexual and reproductive health and rights, it's going to appoint someone who will serve in any meaningful capacity.

Jennie: Yeah, I definitely don't expect a champion of women in particularly reproductive health. Like, I mean, I agree. Maybe we'll see some more meaningless women's economic empowerment. Yay. Which not that that's bad, but it's incomplete. You can't just talk about women’s economic empowerment, you have to talk about the entire woman and all the things that enabled her to be economically empowered. And as Stephanie said, reproductive rights is a huge part of that. If you can't plan your family, you can't have a career. Stephanie: Absolutely. And if this administration is working to actively undermine your sexual and reproductive health and rights, well then that's even worse because it's throwing up all sorts of barriers to women's political and economic participation. Jennie: Okay. So that is what has happened. Um, what do we expect this year? Stephanie: Um, any day now, [the reports should be coming out], literally is what my former colleagues at the State Department tell me, the 2018 human rights reports are all baked and ready to go. They're waiting for Secretary sign off. Um, and I got a look at the preparation instructions that circulated to embassies this past summer, telling them how to prepare this year as human rights reports. And I can tell you, shocker that reproductive rights are not going to be in these reports and that there were changes made to how embassies should go about collecting information on sexual and gender based violence, disability rights, and LGBTQ rights. It remains to be seen, um, whether that means diminished reporting, an alteration of what the focus of priorities is. I know that Oxfam intends to update their Sins of Omission report, uh, with the data from 2018 we'll all be looking at it closely so maybe I can come back and talk to you once they drop. Um, but we know from a reproductive rights standpoint that nothing's going to change. It's only going to get worse. We'll have, I'm a second year of no reporting on reproductive rights and as I said, no maintenance of those critical relationships and contacts and meetings. And that is why CRR is currently suing the Department of State, not once, but twice over the deletion of reproductive rights from the 2017 reports over what we know will be the continued deletion and the 2018 reports, we're suing under the Freedom of Information Act, we are attempting to get the actual full as written reproductive rights sections from the 2017 reports, which were cut at the very last second drafted and cleared all the way up through the ambassador in each country and then all the way up through Washington DC to the secretary level before those deletions were ordered at the last minute. Um, so that we can publish them for you all and them we're also to find out who is doing the ordering here about the deletion because Rex Tillerson wasn't really somebody that was super concerned about this. If I had to guess, I think you would agree with me Mike Pence and his people who are embedded everywhere throughout this administration who have engaged in a war on women and a war on our health and rights for many years. Um, dating back to his time as governor. Jennie: Yeah, I know you just kind of look at the things targeted LGBTQ rights, reproductive rights. Those are right up his alley. Stephanie: Yup. And Donald Trump just doesn't care enough to do anything about it. Jennie: Okay, well that's enough of the bummer stuff. But there is some good news which was what happened Thursday.

Stephanie: Yes. So on Thursday 158 members of Congress, 127 in the House of Representatives and 31 in the Senate introduced an amazing bill called the Reproductive Rights are Human Rights Act of 2019. That's HR 1581. Um, we're just a rock star group of repro champions Representative Katherine Clark, a chairman, Elliott Angle of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Chairwoman Lowey of the House Appropriations Committee, Barbara Lee and Lois Frankel and the House. And on the Senate side we have the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bob Menendez, Senator Richard Blumenthal, who's always been a stalwart repro champion. And then of course the amazing Jeanne Shaheen and nothing happens on global women's rights without her. And so, uh, we had a great press conference on Thursday announcing the bill out of the House. And you can go on both Rep Clark and Senator Menendez’s websites and find pictures and a youtube video of the full conference and a great press release. 93 very diverse civil society groups including your group and mine supported this bill as well as PAI, Guttmacher, Planned Parenthood, the Human Rights Campaign, the Global Council on Equality, the American Federation for Teachers. We have just like a panoply of organizations who fight for people's rights both domestically and overseas who are supporting this bill because it's so important to not let data be erased, to not let the lived experiences of women and girls around the world be deleted from the discourse. Because we know this doesn't mean that it's not happening. Their rights are being violated every day. It just means that the US government refuses to do anything about it. They refuse to call it out. They refuse to report on it. They refused to fulfill the fundamental mission of the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor at State, which is to protect and promote the human rights of people around the globe, including women, girls, LGBT persons, youth people living in poverty. These are the groups that are affected first and foremost by these horrible policies that the Trump administration is exporting overseas and then reimporting back here once they succeed again, see the global gag rule and see the defunding of Planned Parenthood under the Title X program, which we call the domestic gag rule. Jennie: Exactly. I mean, if you're not collecting the data to show the problem, you're definitely not investing in fixing it. Stephanie: Absolutely. And so we are very hopeful that the act will receive a hearing and a markup in the House. This year we'll receive a floor vote and then we'll move to the Senate where Senator Blumenthal sat at the press conference. He dares any of his colleagues, Democrat or Republican, to vote against collecting data on women's fundamental human rights around the world. And he said that anybody that voted against this bill should be ashamed of themselves because as Senator Menendez said, this shows who we are as a country. It fundamentally demonstrates the US’s commitment to being that shining city on a hill or any other iteration, which used to be a bipartisan notion of what it means to be a democracy, promoting freedom and human rights. Jennie: So we always like to end with talking about what can the listeners do to fight back. So what can the listeners do? Stephanie: Um, you can call your representatives in Congress because while 127 in the House and 31 in the Senate is good, we can do even better. So please light up those phones, send emails, make sure that whoever is representing you in Congress, in both the house, in the Senate is on this bill. Ask them to hold a hearing on the bill. Um, if they're already on, these are additional actions that you can ask of your repro champions. Ask that of your representatives to ask questions in hearings. I mean the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has nominees for senior positions at the State Department before them on a regular basis and they are about to consider a man for women's issues too. That's right. On global women's issues. They're about to consider the nomination of Robert Destro to be Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. He would have, you know, direct authority over the preparation of these reports. They should ask him whether he would reinstate reporting on reproductive rights. Um, so it's really important to get your representatives to be engaged on this. And then in a number of levels and spoiler alert on Destro, he's definitely not going to reinstate reporting on reproductive rights. He is one of the foremost, um, lawyers on the side of the anti choice movement. As soon as he graduated from law school in the mid 1970s, he wrote a law review article attacking Roe v Wade. He has attacked the ACA ,contraception, and he has a also attacked the rights of LGBTQ people to marry and adopt children. This man is not somebody that you want serving in a senior capacity at the State Department supposedly leading a bureau that's supposed to protect them, promote the human rights of individuals, including women, girls and LGBTQ people around the world. So you can also ask your senators to vote against the confirmation of Robert Destro as Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. Jennie: Those are all great and never goes amiss. If your member is already on, say thank you as go along way. They should not just always hear what we want. We always should say thank you when they are doing things that are amazing. Stephanie: Absolutely. Please, please, please let all the repro champions on the hill know that you're with them because they are fighting every day in the trenches for our rights and they're being attacked online and on the phones by a very vocal minority who is dead set on rolling back our human rights both here and overseas. Jennie: Oh, thank you Stephanie. This was amazing and I hope our listeners learned a lot. I learned a lot. Um, and we will only have to have you on to follow up when the new human rights report comes out. Stephanie: Great. Thank you so much, Jennie. It was a pleasure.

Jennie: For more information, including show notes from this episode and previous episodes, please visit our website reprotsfightback.com. You can also find us on Facebook and Twitter at repros fight back. If you like our show, please help others find it by sharing it with your friends and subscribing, rating and reviewing us on iTunes. Thanks for listening.