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This paper was presented at the XIII Bahian Researchers Symposium on Women and Gender Relations held at NEIM/UFBA in Salvador from 4-7 November 2008. The purpose of the study was to identify and analyse changes in women's lives in Salvador, Bahia over three successive generations, and how these changes relate to processes of women's empowerment. …

The women of Indonesia with unwanted pregnancies face stark choices: giving birth and facing social ostracism, loss of family support network, and even harsh criminal punishment; or an abortion from a clandestine provider, risking serious injury or death. The complexity of Indonesian life is multifaceted. Ruled by multiple formal and traditional legal systems, it remains embroiled in an on-going struggle to establish its identity during the process of democratization and a strengthening of Islamic values in a time when the vast majority of its population, as Muslims, feel under attack by the West’s ‘war on terror’. The campaign to bring in a new health bill including the decriminalization of abortion has been challenged, facing lack of consensus that high maternal mortality rates are primarily caused by clandestine abortions, varying reasons behind reforms to the health law, and lack of political will to see through the change because of difference of opinion. …

This paper was presented at Fazendo Genero (Doing Gender) 8 held at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina from 25-28 August 2008. The purpose of the study was to identify and analyse changes in women's lives in Salvador, Bahia over three successive generations, and how these changes relate to processes of women's empowerment. …

Diasporic Somalis are increasingly leading a transnational life in which family members are sustained through networks of relations, obligations and resources that are located in different nation-states. These networks and relations enable diasporic Somalis to seek safety for themselves and their relatives, minimize risks and maximize family resources. In this article, Mulki Al-Sharmani examines three key dimensions of such a way of life, namely: migration; remittances; and transnational family care. She focuses on the roles that women play in this family-based support system. …

Brazil is characterized by deep social and economic inequalities. Women make up the majority of Brazil’s poorest: they represent the majority of the unemployed, and even those Brazilian women who have jobs often suffer from disproportionately low salaries and few social protections. Women face similar inequalities in the political sphere. Brazilian women won the right to vote in 1934 but even though women currently make up 51 per cent of the electorate, they hold less than 10 per cent of elected seats, placing Brazil among the countries of the world with the lowest proportion of women in public office. …

Brazil has the greatest experience in the weakness of quotas. There are no obligations for the parties to use them, and no one is held to account for not doing it. An international workshop was held to intervene in ongoing demands for political reform in Brazil to redress the low representation of women in national government, by drawing together lessons from successful efforts to bring women into office through quota systems. …

The purpose of this study was to identify and analyse changes in women's lives in Salvador, Bahia over the last three generations, and how these changes relate to processes of women's empowerment. The project began in July 2007 and involved working with a panel of 400 women from different generations living in the Plataforma region of Bahia, Brazil. Young girls from the region and university students were trained to use media equipment to interview their mothers and grandmothers on how life has changed in the region. …

This project researched the reforms that have been taking place in Egyptian personal status laws since 2000. The aim was to examine the unfolding reform story and what it entailed in terms of successes and challenges for women's rights activists in their pursuit of justice and equality in marriage and divorce rights, and for Egyptian women at large who seek legal redress in family courts. The focus of the study was on two aspects of the reform story: 1) the process of mobilising for the new laws, building alliances, choosing strategies, and making concessions, and 2) the implementation of the legal reforms in the new family courts that were introduced in 2004. …

This pack of 20 vibrantly drawn cards provides a clear and very accessible entry into some of Pathways’ research findings and recommendations. The cards feature research from Bangladesh, Brazil, Egypt, Ghana, Pakistan, Palestine, and Sierra Leone, across the four Pathways themes of: conceptualising empowerment, empowering work, building constituencies and changing narratives of sexuality.  …

This bulletin highlights the profound inequities of access both globally and nationally to safe abortion, and the importance of global and national movements for reform to address this. Contributions focus in particular on policy reform and what can be learned from struggles in different parts of the world to obtain or retain safe abortion services. …