Women's Network of Croatia

To whom it may concern,
On July the 30th of 2009 the Medical Conception Act entered into force. Although the Act concerns basic rights and contains criminal provisions, it wasn't voted regularly by the Parliament of the Republic of Croatia. The Act is essentially unconstitutional because it restricts the rights of women to freely dispose of their own body based on their marital status. Therefore it violates their human rights and basic freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution of the Republic of Croatia. These rights derive from the basic legal provisions of the Constitution that, in the article 3, define freedom, equality and respect of the human rights as the highest values of the constitutional order of the Republic of Croatia.
The marital status of women shouldn’t restrict their right to control their reproductive functions. The reproductive rights of women should be guaranteed to all women and not just to the married ones or to the ones in civil unions.
To deny the right to have children to one part of the female citizens is humiliating. That kind of discriminative action forces an unmarried woman to seek medical help in other states. If they don’t have the means to do so, the Act completely disempowers them by denying them the right to a medical treatment that could help them conceive.
For all above-mentioned, the members of the Women's Network of Croatia have proposed a motion for the evaluation of the constitutionality of the Medical Conception Act to the Constitutional Court in Zagreb. The motion was proposed within the action “Moja maternica, moji jajnici, o njima ne mogu odlučivati državni i crkveni tajnici” during which they distributed info-leaflets about women’s reproductive rights, T-shirts and stickers with the slogan of the action.
Best regards,
Coordination Team of Women's Network of Croatia

Bojana Genov
Nela Pamuković
Đurđica Kolarec
Sanja Juras
Mirjana Kučer