50 Years of Activism: Sexual and reproductive health and rights

Over the past 50 years, the scope and scale of Inter Pares’ work on bodily autonomy— the freedom and power to control one’s own body — has been deeply and profoundly rooted in feminist principles and practice. A commitment to learning and collaboration, trust and solidarity, and agency and freedom underscore who we are, and why this issue matters to us. We advocate, fundraise, engage with the public and build coalitions, aspiring that everyone, everywhere has access to sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR). While the issues we work on have evolved and expanded, our foundation remains constant. Feminist principles and practice are as true of our past, as they are of our present and future.

Looking back

In the early days of Inter Pares, we supported Gonoshasthaya Kendra (GK) - The People’s Health Centre - a then-relatively new organization, whose goal was to provide quality healthcare to impoverished rural women and men in Bangladesh. In the 1980’s, international aid organizations and pharmaceutical companies funded coercive, violent and forced population control measures that largely targeted women in the country. These programs were implemented by the Bangladeshi government. GK challenged both the logic and humanity of these programs with the support of Inter Pares—an unorthodox stance at the time—but one that was based in a deep-rooted understanding of their own context. GK also challenged health care legislation in their country, successfully advocating for a national generic drug policy to make essential drugs more accessible to the poor. 

At the same time, Inter Pares worked with Canadian women’s and health groups to promote safe contraception and generic drug policies in Canada.  From this experience, we co-created a play called Side Effects with input from GK and women’s groups in Bangladesh and Canada, interrogating the medicalization of women’s health. Side Effects toured across Canada, bringing together the public with health care and women’s rights activists sparking rich conversation. From these connections the Canadian Women’s Health Network was born, a feminist hub for health research and action. 

“Wherever we worked, Inter Pares placed women’s oppression and exploitation at the centre of our analysis and activism. We connected North-South women’s and other organizations through programs of solidarity and a mutuality of interest in order to learn from and support each other. Many of these programs had a profound effect on people’s lives, laws and on public education,” notes Karen Seabrooke, a former Inter Pares staff member.

Our focus on addressing the oppression of women expanded through the 1990s. In Burma, the junta was subjugating thousands to brutality and violence, resulting in waves of displacement on the basis of race. Women’s sexual and reproductive health services were extremely difficult to access. Inter Pares supported local medical leaders from Burma who trained trusted health workers from affected regions to support women’s health needs. We were the first Canadian organization to raise significant funds for the training of hundreds of Indigenous birth attendants and mobile medical teams who helped stem the tide of maternal mortality in Burma’s conflict zones. 

Where we are, today

Inter Pares’ activism on bodily autonomy and sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) today continues in collaboration with a range of long-term counterparts around the world. The work is diverse, it is effective and it is implemented by national feminist movements. In El Salvador, La Colectiva Feminista para el desarollo local is taking a moment to bask in their successful battle at the Inter American court for legal recognition of abortion rights, otherwise known as the Beatriz case. In the Philippines, Likhaan Center for Women’s Health is a central actor in advocating for the implementation of the right to comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) for young people in the face of powerful fundamentalist opposition. In Latin America, Colombia Diversa is making ground-breaking progress in public and political awareness to overcome stigma and discrimination on LGBTQ+ rights, not just in Colombia but in the region. On the Thai-Burma border, the Mae Tao Clinic is implementing a holistic program related to safe birthing that has carried on decade after decade through waves of political turmoil to serve women from Burma who would otherwise go through their pregnancies and deliveries with little-to-no skilled accompaniment or pre- and post-natal care.

Samantha McGavin, Inter Pares’ Executive Director and a member of the Burma team at Inter Pares reflects that “It is truly magical that what began as a chance meeting between my late colleague, Peter Gillespie, and a young medical doctor, Dr. Cynthia Maung, on the Thai-Burma border has blossomed into a profound institutional relationship of many decades, significantly amplifying and expanding the work of the Mae Tao Clinic along the way. This is emblematic of the way Inter Pares works.”

Throughout our history, the SRHR issues we have worked on have evolved and expanded: access to safe contraception and abortion, adoption of feminist-driven health policies, challenging coerced and forced sterilization in addition to the overall medicalization of women’s health, funding for SRHR, and support to local feminist SRHR organizations. In a testament to Inter Pares’ early SRHR activism and political analysis, there are strong parallels between what we used to do and what we continue to do, based on the ethos that women and marginalized people have the right and should have the power to control their own bodies. 

We still work on forced sterilization, but current efforts also focus on survivors in Peru who suffered from the policies of the Fujimori dictatorship. Facilitated by our Peruvian counterpart, SISAY, a few years ago they found solidarity in connections with Indigenous activists in Canada who are challenging our own country’s shameful history of forced sterilization. 

Inter Pares has also developed a stronger focus on accompanying LGBTQI+ organizations – in Sudan through the Sudanese Agency for Gender Inclusion and Advocacy (SAGIA), in Colombia through Fondo Lunaria and Colombia Diversa, in Peru through DEMUS, and in Guatemala through Asociación Lambda. Domestically, we are a member of the Canadian Health Coalition and continue to support the goal of a national pharmacare program, which includes free access to contraception as well as other medicines. 

With our support, our overseas counterparts have developed stronger programs focused on adolescent sexual health – in Bangladesh with Nijera Kori and in El Salvador with La Colectiva  – even though the political and social environment they work in is often politically fraught and their work can be dangerous when it runs counter to right-wing and fundamentalist forces.

How we do this work

While the injustices we tackle evolve and change, the way we work hasn’t. Inter Pares maintains a consistency in the tools and methodologies deployed to reach our SRHR goals. It is about feminist process.

In the 1980’s, our domestic political advocacy focused on preventing the funding of coercive and forced sterilization programming, supported by Canada through the World Bank1. Today, one of our political advocacy goals is ensuring that Global Affairs Canada prioritizes the four neglected areas of SRHR: safe abortion, adolescent health including CSE, contraception and advocacy. 

In the 1990’s, we raised funds from the Canadian government to support the expansion of Likhaan’s SRHR community organizing, clinical services and government advocacy. In the decades that followed, we would continue to seek and secure funding to support Likhaan’s work and, in early 2025, we signed another agreement with the government of Canada to fund Likhaan’s work through a 7-year commitment, with SRHR financing as an added thematic. 

Our 1980’s feminist public engagement project, the Side Effects play, has a parallel in the 2024 photo exhibit daughters, mothers, grandmothers and other sexual outlaws which, by its conclusion, will have appeared in at least eight Canadian cities, including Victoria, Whitehorse, Winnipeg, Ottawa, Toronto, Gatineau, Kitchener-Waterloo and Fredericton.

Inter Pares’ current involvement in coalition work with the Future Planning Initiative (FPI) has its roots in the early Inter Pares coalition efforts to ensure our own government rolled out feminist SRHR policies. The FPI was critical in ensuring a ten-year commitment by the Government of Canada in 2019 to spend $1.4 billion annually on women and children’s health, with half of that amount exclusively targeting SRHR. 

Rita Morbia who has worked on SRHR at Inter Pares and is a member of the FPI says, “Coalition work is the beating heart of Inter Pares – a powerful way to amplify and connect seemingly disparate voices to reach feminist objectives.”

Issues of SRHR hold so much stigma and are so often weaponized to further regressive and autocratic political ideologies. An important tactic throughout Inter Pares’ history to build feminist solidarity, while also sharing knowledge has been learning exchanges. Nathalia Santos Ocasio, who recently joined Inter Pares as Latin America program manager and participated in a public engagement tour in the Canadian Maritimes in late 2024 with counterparts from Bangladesh, the Philippines and El Salvador, highlights the continuing value of South-North knowledge exchanges as a key praxis of reciprocity that will help us carry on SRHR work into the future. “As threats to reproductive rights and bodily autonomy are magnified within the current political landscape, cross-geographic dialogue with counterparts helps us develop strong strategies to challenge societal norms and structural injustices exposing queer people and marginalized women in Canada and around the world to injustices, violence and premature death.” 

Continuing onwards

With the energy and dynamism that each new generation brings to Inter Pares, we are determined to build on our 50-year legacy of activism around bodily autonomy. We will learn from the past, aspire to meet the present moment, and boldly aim to co-create an inclusive future. Together with courageous counterparts, committed supporters and persistent allies, we will keep finding ways to support the people and movements leading the fight for bodily autonomy—just as we always have.

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