Ipas Promotes Abortion as Youth Empowerment

Ipas is an international organization working to legalize and promote abortion access everywhere in the world. They do all sorts of things, including trying to convince conservative communities that abortion is moral and that access to it is of great importance. Ipas does a lot of “value clarification” work in Africa, offering training and other “educational materials” to “equip” healthcare providers, policymakers, educators, and young people with the necessary “tools” to overcome their stigma against abortion. This is cultural imperialism at its best.

A snapshot from the Ipas website on their achievements in 2023

In a recent webinar, “Empowering youth: Addressing child marriage, teenage pregnancy, and school dropout,” Ipas invited panelists to talk about the interlinkage between unsafe abortions, school dropout, poverty, and child marriage. Ignoring any of these factors, the Ipas spokesperson argued, would likely delay or even threaten the realization of youth empowerment. 

Abortion advocates like to tie their projects to broader humanitarian work in developing countries. This helps Ipas at least on a normative level as it legitimizes their efforts as part of a human rights agenda. By framing opposition to abortion as opposition to the education and empowerment of young people, abortion advocates end up creating partnerships with other influential NGOs in those respective areas and receive funding from initiatives that would otherwise have little to do with abortion.

One of the panelists also talked about the “sustainable abortion ecosystem” that looks at the intersecting determinants of abortion access in a given community. This only goes to show the extent to which Ipas seeks to affect change abroad. To them, making abortion legal is not enough. The whole ecosystem needs to change to favor abortion.

Retrieved from the Ipas website