Graduate Scholarships in Reproductive Health Law

The scholarship is designed to enable students to explore the legal and ethical issues in reproductive and sexual health, such as the multiple causes of maternal mortality; barriers to availability of and access to reproductive health services; the prevention and treatment of sexually transmitted diseases, including AIDS; and abusive sexual relationships. Beyond the required graduate seminar in Alternative Approaches to Legal Scholarship and the foundation course in Reproductive and Sexual Health Law, and the Health Equity and Law Clinic, course work is designed on an individual basis, subject to the approval of the Assistant Dean, Graduate Studies..

Students are encouraged to select other courses relevant to their plan of study, such as courses addressing medical law and ethics; national and international protection of human rights including women's rights; family law issues including violence against women; feminism and the law; law and development; and law and society issues. Given the Faculty's support of interdisciplinary approaches to legal scholarship, students holding this scholarship may also register for courses in other departments of the university including Women and Gender Studies and Bioethics through the Collaborative Degree Programs.

In addition to formal courses, students are encouraged to participate in workshops held at the Faculty of Law, the Joint Centre for Bioethics and the Centre for Research on Women's Health. Some students may wish to apply for an internship related to their research for approximately 10 weeks with a relevant organization, arranged through the Faculty's International Human Rights Program, and/or build their research skills through contributions to the Programme's listserve and/or the Women's Human Rights Resources website. .

The Scholarships cover tuition and incidental fees, provide a stipend of $15,000 and books. This scholarship is open to any graduate student from the targeted regions.

After completion of their Fellowship, a Fellow must return to their home country and reside there for a minimum of two years. The purpose of the two-year home residency requirement is to ensure that Fellows fulfil the objective the Fellowship programme, the international protection and promotion of reproductive and sexual rights.

For more information, please see our 4-page colour brochure Graduate Scholarships in Reproductive and Sexual Health Law.

Beatriz Galli LLM 2002 While a student at the Faculty of Law, Beatriz Galli's research focused on the major causes of maternal mortality in her home country of Brazil. She divided her internship between two Brazilian non-governmental organizations, SOS Corpo and ADVOCACI. At SOS Corpo in Recife, she consulted legal cases involving sexual reproductive rights and studied maternal mortality in the Brazilian state of Pernambuco. For ADVOCACI, a human rights organization, Beatriz helped to translate information on the Inter-American System of Human Rights from Spanish to Portuguese. Galli is now Executive Coordinator of a Brazilian NGO called Advocacy: Litigation for Human Rights, and sits on the Rio de Janeiro State Maternal Mortality Committee.

Kibrom Isaak Teklehaimanot LLM 2001 Abortion law in his home country of Eritrea was the focus of Kibrom Isaak Teklehaimanot's LLM research at the Faculty of Law. His internship was spent with Ipas, an NGO concerned with women's reproductive health based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Teklehaimanot is an active scholar and an article of his appeared recently in the journal, Reproductive Health Matters. He has just completed "Annotated Decisions of African Commonwealth Courts Relating to Reproductive and Sexual Health and Women's Status," which is being used by the Nigerian Women's Aid Collective and other African women's health advocacy groups.