Reproductive Health and Reproductive Rights

 

Reproductive Health and Reproductive Rights

Reproductive health and reproductive rights stand for a traditional approach to anchor family planning as a human right.

The concept has been linked to family planning by the UN Population Department under the umbrella term human rights since 1966.

Result of the World Population Conference 1994

 

At the World Population Conference in Cairo in 1994, reproductive rights and international population policy were linked with "health" under the name Sexual and reproductive health and rights ( SRHR for short ). Internationally active population and development organizations such as the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), WHO, UNFPA, USAID, and the World Bank have since defined sexual and reproductive health and rights as goals of human rights-based politics.

 

Reproductive health and reproductive rights continue to be the primary paradigm for population control. The industrialized countries since 1958 (according to the Coale- Hoover study)  to the developing countries state that a slowdown in population growth is necessary for sustainable (economic) development to be.

 

Each person is thus granted the right to lead a satisfactory sex life and (officially) to decide on the number of his children himself. It is required that everyone should have access to information about contraception and to safe, effective, and affordable contraception. In addition, every woman should have access to medical care during pregnancy and childbirth.  Thirdly, everyone should be able to receive health services that protect them from or treat sexual diseases. The focus should be on individual rights to self-determination, physical integrity, and non-discrimination.

Situation today

In many countries around the world, people cannot fully exercise their "reproductive rights" (including abortion). It is argued that the main reason for this is poverty (costs for education and contraception).

 

The fight against female genital mutilation is assigned to this traditional approach by the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Reception

A comprehensive reform of population policy was promised in the final document of the World Population Conference in Cairo. Critics of that last document, however, assume merely rhetorical concessions  (rhetorical shift). With regard to the incongruity of women affected by self-determination rights and the fulfillment of neo-colonial demands, one speaks of "ideological schizophrenia."

 

"With the feminization of argument succeeded the population lobby - relying on women's health - with, to make matters to be discussed term reproductive rights' to a rhetorical relatively uncontroversial problem area." (Többe Gonçalves 2000).

 

"In this respect, the health discourse is the central 'content-related' hinge for the re-articulation of the population-political macro and micro level after Cairo ." (Schultz 2006).

 

"The activists did not imagine when they signed onto the population control movement that they would merely be presentation consultants. It is telling that many Third World feminists have refused to endorse population control programs at all, arguing instead that these programs violate the rights of women while ignoring their real needs. It must be painful for Western feminists to contemplate, but their own movement has 'co-opted,' to use Betsy Hartmann's term, by another movement for whom humankind as a whole, and women, in particular, remain an anonymous mass of numbers to be exact, that is to say, contracepted, aborted, and sterilized.

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