WUNRN
Will Women's
Reproductive Rights Be Adequately Included in the Post-2015 Development Agenda?
By Rebecca Brown* - July 17, 2014
The United Nations’ post-2015
development agenda is the next phase of the Millennium
Development Goals, which provided a 15-year road map to tackle
poverty and foster development in the world’s poorest countries. But as putting
together the new agenda moves forward, it is becoming clear that the critical
needs of women may be pushed aside.
Currently,
there are 17 proposed Sustainable Development Goals to meet by 2030.
Two of the draft goals address health and gender equality, which is good news.
The bad news is that the two countries leading the process for developing these
goals — Kenya and Hungary — have removed sexual and reproductive health and
rights from the health goal and watered down the gender equality goal, a major
setback for women.
Kenya and
Hungary have made these cuts ostensibly because they are trying to cut down the
number of targets in their proposal. They think that emphasizing sexual and
reproductive health and rights under two different goals is repetitive and they
contend there is no consensus on these issues among member states at the UN.
But in reality, the importance of sexual and reproductive rights for all
individuals — particularly women and girls — means that these issues should
receive extra attention in any set of development goals, and more than 50
states have spoken up to agree.
Ensuring
sexual and reproductive rights is crucial to promoting gender equality. Because
women are uniquely able to become pregnant and are still expected to take on
the majority of child-rearing responsibilities in countries across the globe,
their ability to control their fertility affects many other aspects of their
lives — employment, education, family life and civic participation. As such, we
cannot ensure equal rights for every person if sexual and reproductive rights
are not included in the new development agenda.
The UN and
its member states recognized the importance of ensuring that women were placed
on equal footing with men in all avenues of life when establishing the
Millennium Development Goals in 2000. Two of the goals — improving maternal
health and promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment — attempted to
address the deep deficiencies in women’s equality and their well-being
worldwide.
But because
these gender-specific goals were so limited in scope and did not include all
member states or highlight the need to focus on the most marginalized women,
and they were not adequately connected to each other, meager progress has been
made to achieve substantive gender equality.
For
instance, the goal on maternal health, which focused
primarily on maternal mortality, addressed only one aspect of ensuring women’s
reproductive rights — without paying enough attention to the range of sexual
and reproductive health services that women need.
The goal
on gender equality sought only to tackle disparities in access to
primary education and public participation, ignoring the wider set of root
causes that lead to gender inequalities and violations of women’s human rights.
The MDGs also failed to make the link between gender equality and reproductive
rights, a huge missed opportunity to assure women’s decision-making power over
their bodies and their lives.
Though many
developing nations have experienced drops in maternal mortality rates as a
result of the MDGs, women in poor and rural communities still struggle to
receive necessary and, in some cases, lifesaving reproductive health services.
Moreover, countries and development donors have paid little attention to ensuring
access to other reproductive health services — including contraception and
abortion –that could prevent maternal deaths and promote gender equality more
broadly. Women in these parts of the world face a 15 times higher risk of dying
during pregnancy than women in developed nations face.
But denial
of women’s sexual and reproductive rights does not just persist in developing
countries. A study published in May by The Lancet found that the United States is one
of eight countries — including Afghanistan, Belize, El Salvador and South Sudan
— where maternal deaths have actually increased in the last decade. Low-income
and marginalized women in the US also face wide discrepancies when they obtain
reproductive health services, from the quality of maternal health care to
contraception and abortion availability.
This is why
civil society groups involved in securing better reproductive care access for
women are pushing all member states of the UN to commit to such achievements in
the new Sustainable Development Goals.
If the UN
truly wants to combat inequality and poverty and improve lives, the post-2015
development agenda must be grounded in human rights and include reproductive
autonomy and universal access to sexual and reproductive health care services,
information and education. Countries must take affirmative measures — like
allocating adequate resources — so that all women can freely exercise their
reproductive human rights.
The new
development agenda must include and support women this way.
*Rebecca
Brown is Director of Global Advocacy at the Center for Reproductive Rights.