With GGD’s Not Pregnant for Now project, “vulnerable women” are actively approached by social workers to talk about their desire to have children. The program only aims to help women who do not want to become pregnant by providing contraception such as the “shot pill. Vulnerable women, in the context of this project, are women with problems involving mental illness, drug addiction, debt or women with residency status, among others.
At Bureau Clara Wichmann and the Dutch Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (NJCM), there were great concerns about whether the human rights and women’s rights safeguards were sufficiently taken into account in this project: who are considered vulnerable? Also, is there enough room to say “no” to someone coming in from the government? Are privacy and the right to self-determination adequately taken into account?
The organizations did not see these safeguards reflected in the project, nor in the grant award from the central government (which allowed the project to be rolled out nationwide).
After several discussions and sending a scientific report containing the relevant human rights and women’s rights did not lead to change, Bureau Clara Wichmann and the NJCM. saw no other option than to conduct proceedings. These objection proceedings focused on the subsidy award. The two organizations were assisted in this by lawyers from PILP and from the firm Stibbe, who conducted the case pro bono.
The proceedings led to a nice substantive result in the summer of 2020. According to the minister, there may indeed be the possibility that a woman may feel compelled to give the answer she expects the professional to want to hear. Of course, this should never happen, as it amounts to the indirect exercise of coercion by the government in the very personal matter of a child’s desire.
The government has therefore imposed new obligations on the Now Not Pregnant project, including:
- a commitment to specific attention to the human rights framework in training, framework and peer review for all those involved in the project,
- an accessible and widely known complaint hotline for participants, and
- mandatory training with attention to the human rights framework for the professionals conducting the interviews.
These obligations largely meet the demands of Bureau Clara Wichmann and the NJCM. The organizations are therefore pleased with this result and see it as a fine example of how strategic litigation can lead to results that could not be achieved by merely conducting interviews or demanding (media) attention. The two organizations will continue to follow the ‘Now Not Pregnant’ project critically.
