Protest in Washington, DC, USA October 4, 2021. Photo by Gayatri Malhotra, Unsplash.com, published under Unsplash License. This article by Mia Baxley was originally published on Balkan Diskurs, a project of the Post-Conflict Research Center (PCRC). An edited version has been republished by Global Voices under a content-sharing agreement. The preservation of reproductive rights is one of the greatest challenges to personal rights in 2022. Activists in both the developed and developing worlds share the common fear of roll-back on previously established legal rights. A new report report by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) indicates that at least half of all pregnancies every year across the world are unintended, resulting from intimate sexual violence, wartime rape, and general lack of access to birth control and sexual education. Оn June 24, the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a landmark 1973 decision that legalized abortion across all 50 states. It guaranteed protections for women’s reproductive health, voiding nearly every major state-level abortion ban. According to the Guttmacher Institute, at least 21 US states have laws or constitutional amendments already in place to enable quick abortion bans, while four more are likely to ban abortions in the near future. Since 1973, the issue of abortion in the United States has become a sociopolitical competition between pro-choice activists fighting to preserve access to abortion on demand, claiming to represent 80 percent of voting-age Americans who support pro-choice policies, and pro-life activists seeking to de-legalize abortion at the federal level. Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) is no stranger to the fight for reproductive rights, paired with issues stemming from its decentralized state organization. The country’s very recent history of forced pregnancy in the context of genocidal rape has set this small Balkan nation on a similar track to protect the right to choose one’s own reproductive destiny. During the Bosnian War in the early 1990s, the combatant Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) adopted a policy of genocidal rape and forced pregnancy to “plant the seeds” of ethnic Serbs in Bosnia and weaken the ethnic Bosniak bloodline. In response to this crime, the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court formally recognized genocidal rape and forced pregnancy during conflict as a crime against humanity. “Karaman's House,” a location where women were tortured and raped near Foča, in Eastern Bosnia (1992-1994). Photograph provided courtesy of the ICTY, republished via Wikipedia. For female survivors of wartime rape in Bosnia, the act was used almost exclusively for the end goal of producing a pregnancy against the victim’s will. Because of the VRS’s genocide policy, an estimated 20,000 to 50,000 women were raped by VRS soldiers, with many reporting being raped multiple times a day. Rapes occurred in colloquially-named “rape camps” and other detention centers around the country, but they also occasionally occurred inside the woman's own home. The children born out of these forced pregnancies were also victims of the societal perception as tainted from birth. With many of them now well into adulthood, the estimated 2,000–4,000 children born from rape during the war were often referred to as “forgotten children,” “invisible children,” and or the derogatory label “Chetnik” (a term applied to Serbian ultranationalists or paramilitaries). Without singular ethnic identity in a divided country, many such kids either grew up without a place in Bosnian society, or were adopted by couples overseas. Some of them have decided to return in recent years to develop a stronger understanding of the circumstances of their birth. Even though the Balkans is considered highly conservative area, abortions are legal across the region up until the tenth or twelfth week of pregnancy, owing in part to pre-existing laws from the former Yugoslavia which permitted the procedure. Article 191 of the Federal Constitution of Yugoslavia, enacted in 1974, stated that, “it is a human right to decide on the birth of children,” thereby enshrining abortion access as a fundamental human right. The open availability of abortion in Yugoslavia meant that nearly 100 percent of abortions in the federation occurred in medical facilities and death rates for patients were nearly nonexistent. With the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991, the newly emergent republics were left to determine their own abortion laws, with some (like Croatia and Macedonia) choosing to rework and update their previously existing rules. Podsjećamo na sekularnu drzavu. Nećemo natrag na ilegalni pobačaj.