The role of education and good health in maintaining a woman’s well-being, and that of her immediate family and surrounding society cannot be underestimated. Since the women’s reproductive rights of health and its related freedoms lead to the exercising of basic fundamental rights such as education and employment, it becomes paramount to achieve gender equality. Already a third of the illness among women past menarche is attributed to pregnancy, abortion, childbirth, HIV, reproductive tract infections and AIDS.[1] With the low social status of women, their poverty and role in reproduction makes them high health risks and the need for these rights and freedoms becomes paramount. With the evolution of a written standard plan of action being finally set to stone at the Beijing Women’s conference, a issuance was made:
“The human rights of women include their right to have control over and decide freely and responsibly on matters related to their sexuality, including sexual and reproductive health, free of coercion, discrimination and violence. Equal relationships between women and men in matters of sexual relations and reproduction, including full respect for the integrity of the person, require mutual respect, consent and shared responsibility for sexual behavior and its consequences.”[2]
It must be noted that these women’s rights to reproductive health provide women with freedom to either produce life or decide against it and the access and freedom to education to make an informed choice. With the growing population, issues of population control among states directly conflict with these rights, causing a concern as was discussed at the fifth IPCD conference (International Parliamentarians Conference on Population and Development).[3]
The call for empowerment of women in this regard has been gaining momentum with reforms proposed at government level to extend social, political and economic rights to women, and at the grass root level to give women the power to understand, express, and protect their rights. With the governments across the globe being urged to improve the facilities they provide women for reproductive health care or for safe abortions.[4]
However, there are many detractors of population control, as it purportedly restricts women’s reproductive rights. On first look, there doesn’t seem to be any fundamental contradiction between the two practices. However on putting focus on the lives of these women, a new outlook can be gained.
The basic premise of population control is that it is the root cause of poverty and health issues, and the reduction of fertility among women is the solution to the social conundrum. Population control aims to reduce birth rate by affecting effective means like sterilization or Depo Povera[5], compromising on informed consent by coercing women into the usage of long-term practices. While the record in the US and Canada is bad enough, the human rights record is at its worst at India and China with genocide being common and in a few cases government approved.
In recent years, reproductive rights have taken focus towards providing safe methods of abortion and counseling on benefits and risks, but the focus is still on population control. Governments need to understand that the root of political instability, poverty, and environmental degradation lies not in women’s fertility but in inequitable economic and social strata.
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