ARHA is currently engaged in supporting the various organisations and activists in Victoria in their campaign to have abortion de-creminalised. See our fact sheet Legal Status of Abortion in Australia for more information on the current legality of abortion in Australia.
ARHA was also involved in the recent successful overturning of an Australian import law which effectively banned RU486 or Mifepristone which is used in medical abortions, see the Australian Senate Community Affairs Committee's web page for detailed information on the issue. ARHA remains involved and engaged in monitoring the progress of the approval and importing of RU486.
ARHA recently wrote and published a report card which was produced with the assistance of funding from Population Action International. This report card outlines the progress of Australia towards meeting its Cairo commitments.
The report card states that Australia would need to increase its support for sexual and reproductive health activities, including HIV/AIDS, more than five-fold to fulfil the commitments made at Cairo in 1994.
The report card also outlines the basic ideas of the ICPD, the relevance of the ICPD to Australia and Australians, the public support for overseas donations, Australian government spending on reproductive health as well as the situation in the Pacific and a case study of East Timor.
>>>Other ICPD Fact Sheets
The three Australian members of APA - ARHA, Sexual Health and Family Planning Australia, and Cairns and Far North Environment Centre - began a series of workshops in 2001 which brought together staff from family planning organisations, representatives from conservation councils and other environmental organisations, and ARHA members. The workshops, which were run again in 2002 around the country, aimed to promote understanding of the links among environment, population and development issues and to further develop resources on these issues for use by family planning and other NGOs to communicate these issues to their constituents.
A resource kit on these issues was developed as a result of these workshops for use by family planning, environment and development NGOs to communicate these issues to their constituents. Common Ground is funded through APA by the David and Lucille Packard Foundation.
For more information on current activities see our projects page.
Each year ARHA is charged with the Australian Launch of the State of the World Population report.
ARHA has previously held the launch at parliament house and other venues with a strong involvement from committed parliamentarians, diplomats and UN agency representatives.
Please see our events page for details on the 2006 report launch.
Each year the report focuses on a different area of the ICPD Programme of Action and this gives ARHA a great base with which to promote different ICPD issues to a large audience.
Previous topics have been The Promise of Equality: Gender Equity, Reproductive Health and the Millennium Development Goals, The Cairo Consensus at Ten: Population, Reproductive Health and The Global Effort to End Poverty, Making 1 Billion Count: Investing in Adolescents' Health and Rights and Footprints and Milestones: Population and Environmental Change.
All of the reports are available on UNFPA's website.
