Main Points

1

The UN Human Rights Council has completed work on a resolution concerning the rights of women and girls in “humanitarian situations,” adopted without a vote—that is, without any state formally objecting.

2

For the first time in the history of a negotiated UN text, the document uses the concept of “reproductive violence,” which encompasses, among other things, forced abortion, forced pregnancy, and forced sterilization.

3

Adopting the document may lead to a broad interpretation of this term. A similar mechanism of expanding meaning was previously observed with the concept of “sexual and reproductive health and rights.”

4

An expansive interpretation poses a risk to states’ sovereignty in shaping their own family and health policies, going beyond the resolution’s original, humanitarian context.

 

Consensus without a vote, a dispute over words

The UN Human Rights Council has completed work on a resolution titled “Promoting, protecting and respecting women’s and girls’ full enjoyment of human rights in humanitarian situations.” The document formally concerns the protection of the rights of women and girls in “humanitarian situations”—that is, during natural disasters, armed conflicts, and forced displacement. The resolution was adopted without a vote, which in the Council’s diplomatic practice means that no member state chose to formally block the text; this does not, however, automatically signify universal agreement on every one of its elements, but only the absence of any will to open confrontation.

What sets this document apart from the routine, annual thematic resolutions the Council adopts in its June cycle devoted to women’s rights is a single phrase in the preamble. As the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF)—an organization that has lobbied for decades to expand the legal availability of abortion—points out, this is the first instance in which a negotiated UN outcome document (that is, one agreed upon by member states, not merely by experts or rapporteurs) has employed the term “reproductive violence” as a distinct, named category of gender-based violence.

What exactly does the text say?

The resolution’s preamble expresses deep concern that women and girls in “humanitarian situations” are disproportionately affected by sexual and gender-based violence, including conflict-related sexual violence, trafficking in persons, sexual exploitation, and sexual slavery, as well as—and this is formulated for the first time—“reproductive violence such as forced or denial of contraception, forced pregnancy, forced abortion and forced sterilization, including when undertaken with the intent to destroy a group.”

The final part of this sentence alludes to Article II of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which defines genocide as an act committed “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part,” a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group. The resolution thus places “reproductive violence” in the context of the gravest crimes under international law—which corresponds with the findings of the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory (which in March 2025 documented “sexual and reproductive violence” related to the conflict in the Gaza Strip), as well as with the UN Secretary-General’s 2025 review of the implementation of the Beijing Declaration, which pointed to elevated levels of “reproductive violence” in Gaza, Sudan, Yemen, Syria, and Ukraine.

The American columnist Carrie N. Baker, in a piece for “Ms. Magazine,” interprets the document far more broadly than its literal wording warrants—suggesting that the UN has thereby also labeled national restrictions on access to abortion, in force in many democratic states in peacetime, as “forced birth.” The text of the resolution itself, however, speaks solely of forced abortion and forced pregnancy in the context of “humanitarian situations” and armed conflicts—not of the refusal to perform abortion on demand within a state’s legal, democratically established legal order. This distinction is of fundamental legal significance, even though—as the track record of similar terms within the UN system shows—it tends to become blurred over time.

A mechanism we already know

The history of international law and human rights knows precedents for such “creep” of terminology from a narrow humanitarian context into the broad context of states’ domestic policy. It is worth recalling that the very concept of “sexual and reproductive health and rights” (SRHR) was born at the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994 as a descriptive, legally non-binding term—and today it is routinely invoked by UN treaty bodies, special rapporteurs, and the European Parliament as a basis for demanding that member states expand the legal availability of abortion, even though no international human rights treaty establishes any so-called right to abortion outright.

A similar process can be anticipated for “reproductive violence.” This term—defined more broadly by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) as intentional acts or omissions that violate “reproductive autonomy”—also encompasses, in the view of UNFPA and UN Women (the UN entity meant to work for women’s rights), “attacks on reproductive healthcare facilities.”

From the standpoint of protecting states’ sovereignty in shaping their own family and health policies, inserting the term “reproductive violence” into an official, agreed UN document raises the risk of an expansive interpretation. A term that arose in the context of war crimes and the crime of genocide (forced pregnancies in camps, forced sterilization of minorities) may, over time and through successive reports and general comments by treaty bodies, be extended to matters lying beyond the drafters’ intentions.

Planned Parenthood is pleased

Dr. Diana Pulido of Planned Parenthood Humanitarian assessed the document’s adoption as “an important step forward for women and girls in humanitarian crises,” stressing that naming the phenomenon finally makes it possible to see “a distinct and devastating form of harm that has too often gone unrecognised.” Supporters of the resolution—including UNFPA—argue that without a distinct name for “reproductive violence,” the victims of forced pregnancies or forced sterilization (phenomena that are also indisputably condemned by international humanitarian law and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court) are left without adequate legal language to describe the harm done to them.

Protecting women and girls from sexual and reproductive violence in zones of armed conflict and in humanitarian situations is one of the most indisputable and urgent obligations of the international community. This is confirmed by documented cases from Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine, and Myanmar. What is troubling, however, is the use, for this purpose, of ideological formulations that lend themselves to broad interpretation. The result may be attempts to pressure states into implementing demands that conflict with their legal order.

Julia Książek – analyst at the Ordo Iuris Center for International Law

See also:

Source of cover photo: iStock

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