Women’s health: Using human rights to gain reproductive rights
December 1998
Panos Briefing
10 December 1998 is the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). “International human rights law has been guilty of ‘gender-blindness’,” says Pierre Sané, Secretary General of Amnesty International. “For too long it focused on the ‘public’ arena largely populated by men and neglected the so-called ‘private’ sphere of home, family and community in which women are traditionally enclosed.”
International and regional human rights treaties entitle women to precisely the same protection as men when they suffer the same abuses as men. Men, however, do not get pregnant or have babies. Nor do they face the same range of views about how their lives should be shaped by their biological capacities. Only during this decade has women’s reproductive health, and the factors which determine it throughout their life cycle, begun to be viewed and monitored through the lens of human rights.
Keywords: women, health
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