There is a growing focus on generating evidence on violence against informal women workers across the world.

“Women hold up half the sky”, the Chinese saying goes. But we need to recognize that it is not an equal world for women, globally and in India.

Legal reforms have been at the centre of the agenda for strategizing gender justice in India. This has been so, right from the time of nine-teenth century social reforms movements, through the period of nationalist struggles, down to the contemporary women's movement.

This paper analyses, from the perspective of women's human rights, an unsuccessful attempt to amend the abortion law in the Penal Code of Sri Lanka in 1995.