[Opinion] The global assault on human rights is a danger to gender justice and reproductive freedom

As a young democracy, still grappling with the full realisation of these rights, we now face the grim reality that the nations that once claimed to champion democracy and human rights are being overtaken by authoritarianism, religious nationalism and populist extremism.

The erosion of rights across the globe is not a distant political crisis. It is a direct threat to all movements fighting for gender justice, reproductive autonomy and broader social equality. The attacks on these movements manifest in policy decisions, funding restrictions and ideological exports that seek to suppress feminist gains.

Soul City Institute for Social Justice launched 30 years ago as a health promotion initiative and today stands proud as an advocate for the rights of women, gender rights more broadly and sexual and reproductive health rights. This places us squarely in the crosshairs of right-wing extremists who seek to roll back decades of progress.

We must resist this threat. Our call to fellow South Africans is to double down in our efforts to live up to the ideals of our constitution and defend against the lies and slander that accompanied US president Donald Trump’s assault on SA and a host of other countries.

When South Africans chose a rights-based new beginning in the 1990s, we did this as a deliberate and powerful rejection of our bitter apartheid past. We put behind us the kind of autocratic abyss that Trump and his adherents seem to be headed towards and we will continue to march firmly in the opposite direction.

Soul City Institute regards feminism as a critical contribution to SA's endeavours to build a just and equitable society, gradually overcoming pervasive inequality and its degrading effects.

We came to this realisation through decades of work to prevent and alleviate the impact of HIV and gender-based violence (GBV) and promote the health of mothers and babies. The huge disparity in HIV infections between adolescent boys and men, on the one hand, and adolescent girls and women, on the other, and the sheer scale GBV and femicide in SA can be tracked directly to the oppression of women and gender minorities in our society.

Our efforts to tackle the roots of these social and health problems have aligned the institute with an African liberation tradition that recognises patriarchy as a system of beliefs, social hierarchies and institutional practices that is as harmful to women and gender minorities as racism is to black people.

Since 1994, SA has made progress towards the ideal of a non-sexist society. In the area of education, for example, women lagged historically. But now young women outnumber young men in attaining matric and enrolling at universities and TVET colleges.

However, the disadvantage suffered by women is still evident in many other areas. The unemployment rate for women at about 34% is about four percentage points higher than that for men. Black women living in rural areas experience the deepest poverty.

Where patriarchy combines with the legacy of apartheid the impact is sharpest. Our society has not yet recovered from the way the pass laws destroyed family life, recruiting men to work in the mines and industrial cities while confining women and children to deliberately underdeveloped rural areas.

Today, only 33% of our children live with both parents, while 42% live in households headed by their mothers and 4% with their fathers. Nearly 75% of female-headed households live in poverty, according to Stats SA, compared to 60% of male-headed families.

For millions of SA women, every day is a battle for survival in the face of poverty and for physical safety in the face of an epidemic of sexual and other GBV.

In this context, sexual and reproductive health rights stand out as a vital element in dismantling power imbalances based on gender. Our commitment to reproductive justice aims to ensure that all people can make decisions about their bodies, free from coercion and discrimination.

Effective access to a range of contraceptive methods and better implementation of SA’s progressive laws on the right to abortion are non-negotiable requirements for the attainment of economic and social equality for women.

Soul City Institute has worked across borders and knows the discrimination, disadvantage and brutality women face in our country are replicated – with local nuances – across the rest of Africa. For years conservative Western organisations have aggressively pursued their agendas to crush women’s and gender rights activism in various African countries by funding anti-gender rights movements and backing laws that curtail bodily autonomy.

Democracy is not self-sustaining: it requires vigilance, activism and an unwavering commitment to justice. We will therefore work tirelessly to persuade policymakers, civil society structures, and the broad public to defend gender rights as part of democracy building.

By Phinah Kodisang and Pontsho Pilane
Original article posted on Sowetan Live