Stop cuts to Australia's aid budget - help women and girls decide their future

For many months now, Australia's overseas aid has been targeted for drastic budget cuts — on 12th of May, the new budget was announced, and we began hearing which areas of our overseas work will suffer the most.

This is depressing.

These cuts threaten to destroy the years of progress made on the critically important area of reproductive and sexual health — such as family planning, sexual health education and maternal health, which saves the lives of women and babies.

We know that foreign aid works — Australia's support to IPPF helped save the lives of over 1,300 mothers in the last 4 years. We have helped millions of women access family planning so they can make decisions about their future.

Sign this petition now to call on the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Ambassador for Women and Girls to ensure that Australian aid budget cuts don't undermine women's and girls' right to decide what happens to their body, the size of their family and their future.

By providing sexual and reproductive health services we are not just helping in life and death situations, we are transforming lives, families and communities.

Take the example of Levani in Fiji. She married her seafarer husband when she was 17 years old. She knew that he had unprotected sex while away and was afraid of contracting STD or HIV, but Levani never dared to talk to him about it as she was afraid of making him angry.

Our Member Association — Reproductive and Family Health Association of Fiji — invited the couple to join a training programme which included sexual health education, life skills, and gender equality training workshops for seafarers and their immediate families.

"After the workshop I knew how to negotiate with my husband and practice safe sexual habits. It has made a big change in our lives and our children are happier now", Levani told us after the workshop.

Cuts to Australia's aid budget will reduce our ability to provide these kinds of services and halt the progress we have made. We know this because it happened before. Fifteen years ago family planning services and sexual rights were excluded initially from the global anti–poverty negotiations and millions of women and girls suffered.

Sign this petition to call on the Minister for Foreign Affairs Julie Bishop and Ambassador for Women and Girls, Natasha Stott Despoja, to ensure that Australian aid budget cuts don't undermine women's and girls' right to decide what happens to their body, the size of their family and their future.

If more of us sign the petition, it will be easier for us to make the case to our Government that Australians do not want to go back on the progress they helped make over the years.

We want to show the government the strength of our movement. So please sign now and share with your networks.