ABSTRACT
In the mid-1980s, during a discussion on sex education on the periphery of São Paulo, Brazil, I asked a group of young people whether the rights of women were different from the rights of men. I did not expect bona fide feminist answers, but the one I got from a young man recently arrived from a remote rural area of the country caught me by surprise. He confidently asserted that it was right for women to be good wives and for men to be good providers. I soon realised that the concept of human rights was not part of his vocabulary, and this is still the case for millions of human beings centuries after the French Revolution, and many decades after the landmark Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. If the notion of rights itself is still not universally understood and accepted, reproductive and sexual rights face even greater hurdles. Their history being shorter, their content being more deeply at odds with many traditional practices in many cultures, they are still met with suspicion and resistance in many quarters. This resistance notwithstanding, there is increasing acceptance of reproductive rights, and the rate of dissemination of the concept is so fast that it defies common patterns of cultural change. In the years leading up to the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), in the first of a series of meetings of leading foundations and governments interested in population issues, I heard a representative from a European country object to the use of reproductive rights because there was not such a term in his native language. Soon afterwards, this same person played a key role in negotiating the acceptance of reproductive rights as the bedrock of the plan of action adopted from this same meeting in 1994 in Cairo. The road to Cairo has been analysed from many angles. Most analysts recognise – with praise (Girard 2007) or dismay (McIntosh and Finkle 1995) – the role played by feminists without borders in introducing the concept of reproductive rights and gaining the support from government delegates. They succeeded because of several factors, an important one being that the human rights discourse had gained new political traction the year before with the success of the World Conference on Human Rights held in Vienna. Feminists had moral authority to promote a new paradigm based on human rights because they had gained prominence exactly by criticising population policies for their supposed lack of regard for human rights. Within the loose networks of feminists, however, there were heated discussions about the reproductive rights strategy. In some quarters, reproductive rights were seen as too vague while in others as too narrow, especially because in the USA reproductive rights seemed to mean only the right to abortion. More basically, however, radical feminists feared the possible co-opting of their agenda by the population
establishment, and so-called cultural feminists preferred not to mingle in the world of policy, seen as either hopelessly perverse or utterly irrelevant for the purpose of deep transformation in gender relations. After Cairo, the implementation of the plan of action proceeded at a different pace in different countries, but a remarkable gradual incorporation of the reproductive health and rights discourse in policymaking circles took place. This change in discourse was accompanied by a number of concrete steps at the policy level in many countries. In Latin America, for instance, governments adopted new policies and worked to improve access to reproductive health services. They started providing free contraceptives in their health facilities, a practice that was virtually nonexistent and unthought-of before Cairo. As a result, overall contraceptive use increased steadily in the 1990s, with 64.5 per cent of women aged 15 to 49 now using modern contraceptives in the region (UN 2008). Reproductive rights started to become a reality not only at the theoretical but also at the practical level. Seven years later, the victory of conservatives in the USA and their sustained fight against rights in general – and reproductive rights in particular – placed new obstacles to the realisation of the Cairo Plan of Action. After its prominent role in drafting the Cairo consensus in 1994, and the support it offered to the plan implementation in the following years, the US government shifted right, adopting a conservative agenda and declaring open war on reproductive rights. In 2001, the newly elected Bush administration reinstated the ‘global gag rule’, prohibiting organisations that receive US funding from using their own money to carry out legal abortions, provide information or even discuss abortion in public. As a result, nongovernmental organisations outside the USA were forced to choose between defending women’s health and rights or losing their US funding, which in many cases was vital for their financial survival. In intergovernmental meetings since 2002 the USA ignored the international consensus of 1994 and systematically opposed reproductive rights language. In meeting after meeting, US delegations questioned the use of the terms ‘reproductive health services’ and ‘reproductive rights’, contending that such terms promote abortion and declaring that the USA supports the sanctity of life from the moment of conception to the moment of natural death. But the USA was not able to get the support needed to impose its agenda and, in many cases, ended up isolated in its crusade against reproductive rights. For example, in the 50th session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (2006) it was the only one of 42 countries to reject a resolution on the release of women and children hostages because it contained language reaffirming the Beijing Platform for Action. In the ICPD+10 meetings held in Asia, Africa and Latin America, the USA pressed other countries to repudiate the ICPD agenda, especially the points related to reproductive health and rights for women and young people, but again failed to gain support. In the Open-ended Meeting of the Presiding Officers of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, held in Santiago de Chile in 2004, the USA was the only one of 38 countries to oppose a declaration supporting the ICPD Plan of Action. Even if the concerted efforts of US conservatives did not succeed at the intergovernmental arenas, they were quite successful in energising the conservative forces of other countries, which became instrumental in delaying progress towards the consolidation of reproductive rights in many cases, in countries such as Uruguay,1
Chile,2 and Nicaragua,3 for example. Furthermore, the purse strings controlled by Washington have a powerful effect in intimidating agencies that depend on its largesse. Some of its symptoms include the preference for the term reproductive health instead of sexual and reproductive health and rights. This might appear a mere semantic issue but often ends up influencing the kind of programmes and services that are implemented at local level. Despite these attacks, reproductive rights are now well accepted by the international community and at the national level in many countries. The most recent victory on the acceptance of reproductive rights took place at the 2005 World Summit. Governments from all over the world committed to ‘achieving universal access to reproductive health by 2015 [and to integrate] this goal in strategies to attain the internationally agreed development goals, including those contained in the Millennium Declaration, aimed at reducing maternal mortality, improving maternal health, reducing child mortality, promoting gender equality, combating HIV/AIDS and eradicating poverty’ (UN 2005: 16) Sexual rights, however, are not part of the mainstream discourse yet.
