Legal rights or freedoms as guaranteed by law with respect to reproductive and sexual health are called reproductive rights. The WHO (World Health Organization) has described these rights as follows – “Reproductive rights rest on the recognition of the basic right of all couples and individuals to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing and timing of their children and to have the information and means to do so, and the right to attain the highest standard of sexual and reproductive health. They also include the right of all to make decisions concerning reproduction free of discrimination, coercion and violence.”[1]
The reproductive health rights usually include most or all of the following rights and freedoms[2]:
ü Right to legal and safe abortion
ü Right to Birth Control
ü Right to access to quality prenatal health care
ü Right to education
ü Right to make informed decisions pertaining to one’s pregnancy
ü Right to education about contraception
ü Right to education about sexually transmitted diseases
ü Freedom from contraception, abortion, and coerced sterilization
ü Protection from female/male genital mutilation
These reproductive and sexual rights were first introduced as a part of human rights at a UN conference in 1968. Today, even though some of the aforementioned rights and freedoms are part of hard law enacted through international human right agreements, some are still non-binding recommendations only.
The reproductive health rights include separate chapters about women’s rights as well as men’s rights. Women’s rights focus on a spectrum of issues ranging from sex education, access to family planning services, menopause, to the relationship between economic status and reproductive health.[3] The more broad issues that converge with social issues are tackled under reproductive justice. Men’s reproductive health rights scope the issues of Sexually Transmitted Diseases, exposure to toxins and cancer. Men’s right in reproductive health in regard to their paternity is still a topic of much debate, with ‘male abortion’ being advocated as a case of gender equality.
Feminist movement has usually been the biggest dissenter of reproductive health rights of women, with acts proposed such as voluntary motherhood which preaches abstinence as opposed to contraception. The problem caused much debate in the early 1970s bringing about the biggest divide among feminists – the pro-choice camp and the pro-life camp. While the former argues that the control of a woman’s body should be her own and thus the choice to terminate unwanted pregnancy should be hers too, the latter argues that even a fetus is a life form and the termination of pregnancy is a murder of life. The concept of complicated pregnancy is a matter of contention between the two camps with around 20% of the world’s pregnancies being terminated or lives lost due to complication during the pregnancy.[4]
Reproductive and sexual rights of women are also a standard of human rights with the CEDAW[5] defining discrimination of women on the basis of sex and establishing an agenda to end it in the states ratifying the convention by repealing discriminatory avenues and provisions in their law and enshrining gender equality.
I see that right to life was left out. Guess that’s not important to women?