A coalition including Ipas Mexico says a recent U.N. report on women’s rights and status in Mexico soft pedals pervasive gender violence and inconsistent abortion policies.

Mexico’s latest report to the Committee for the Elimination of Discrimination against Women fails to adequately address gender violence and virtually ignores abortion, says a coalition of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) concerned with women’s issues.

Ipas Mexico is part of the NGO group that includes Católicas por el Derecho a Decidir and GIRE or Grupo de Información en Reproducción Elegida.

The NGOs are criticizing the Mexican government’s sixth periodic report, which was presented at the United Nations headquarters in New York earlier this month. Each country that has signed and ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) must report every four years on its progress ensuring the rights of women. In the convention’s Article 12, for example, it urges its state parties to take appropriate measures to end health-care bias against women and to ensure women have access to pregnancy-related care.

While the Mexican government’s report documented legislative changes and steps taken to improve women’s status across the country, Ipas Mexico and other advocates believe that much was omitted from the document.

To provide a more complete picture of the human-rights landscape, Ipas Mexico and other organizations prepared a “shadow report” — an important background document that can shape the committee’s recommendations and therefore, potentially influence government action.

Fernanda Diaz de Leon of Ipas Mexico said that nongovernmental organizations can play a major role in putting issues on the public agenda.

She said, “Civil society groups can highlight issues that governments don’t want to talk about or point out areas where governments need to act. Ipas and GIRE drafted the shadow report’s chapter on access to abortion, and this was a very important tool for the committee’s experts to determine how the Mexican government has done in improving access to safe and legal abortion.”

The coalition cited areas where it believes Mexico has not shown sufficient proof of compliance to the convention or prior recommendations from the monitoring committee:

• Gender bias in policy and the attitudes of public servants, such as law enforcement officials with whom sexual violence survivors might have contact
• Inconsistent definitions and sanctions of violence among states’ legislations
• Lack of policies to eradicate trafficking of women and girls
• Absence of a national framework that guarantees access to legal abortion
• Few policies that support the provision of quality abortion care by trained and sensitized health-care or legal personnel

Some of these concerns were echoed by questions or additional information requests from the CEDAW committee. The committee said that the report does not include a clear summary of the scope of violence against women in Mexico and needed to provide more information on ways to address clandestine abortion, one of the top five causes of death among Mexican women.

Furthermore, the committee wanted additional data about the results of a national program to guarantee universal access to sexual and reproductive health care in both urban and rural settings.

The CEDAW monitoring committee has issued final comments, highlighting issues to which the Mexican government should pay attention. Its recommendations include: “a harmonization” of state and federal abortion policy; awareness-raising about the risks of unsafe abortion; expansion of reproductive health care and family planning services; wider provision of sex education for both adults and adolescents; and national campaigns about women’s human rights.

Diaz de Leon said, “We are going to follow up on the response or commitments that the government makes. But at the same time, we believe that such recommendations are not just for governments; they are for countries and all the people in them. Together, we must use the recommendations as important tools for advocacy in the coming years.”

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