ABSTRACT
There is nothing obvious about the claim that women should have the right to control their reproductive capabilities or have a right to make voluntary and informed choices about their reproductive and sexual health. In the decades prior to Cairo, women were treated often as targets and acceptors of family planning programs guided by macro level concerns. However since Bucharest in 1974, dissident voices began questioning the demographic rationale and instead proposed a health and rights-based rationale as the reason women should be afforded reproductive rights and health services. The recommendations in the Cairo Program of Action and the Beijing Platform for Action are not simply normative pleas for treating women in a more humane and holistic manner. Instead, these documents, while not legally binding under international law, do place expectations on states, international agencies, NGOs, and even individuals to uphold the commitments codified within the consensus documents. The fact that discursive and normative change occurred at Cairo was not due to a sudden paradigm shift de novo. Rather, the process of normative shift was indeed slow. Since Bucharest, the global women’s health and rights movement and assorted allies began chipping away at the rationale undergirding population control.
