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Introduction
AN EVOLVING UNDERSTANDING.(2) The Cairo consensus
centred on reproductive health and rights grew out of
more than 25 years of experience with population programmes,
and evolving international understandings
about development and human rights. In 1969, when
UNFPA became active, there was no working agreement
on population among the members of the United Nations;
by 1994 UNFPA had programmes in 140 countries.
At the time of the first World Population
Conference in Bucharest in 1974, a large group of
countries, including most of Latin America, franco-phone Africa and parts of Asia, were ambivalent
about population activities beyond data gathering and
maternal and child health. Two decades later, almost
all countries supported the spectrum of reproductive
health activities, including voluntary family planning,
safe motherhood, HIV/AIDS prevention, and
protection against and treatment of sexually transmitted
infections.
FAMILY PLANNING AS A HUMAN RIGHT. The
International Conference on Human Rights in Tehran
in 1968 was the first international forum to agree that
“parents have a basic human right to determine freely
and responsibly the number and spacing of their
children”.
The Bucharest conference affirmed that family
planning was a right of all “individuals and couples”.
But its discussion about reducing high rates of fertility
in developing countries was not explicitly grounded
in women’s rights. The 1974 World Population Plan of
Action, an uneasy compromise, mentioned women
only once.
A year later, however, the First World Conference
on Women, in Mexico City, agreed that the right to
family planning is essential to gender equality.
The 1984 International Conference on Population,
also in Mexico City, added that men should share
responsibility for family planning and child-rearing
“in order to provide women with the freedom to
participate fully in the life of society”, an objective
“integral to achieving development goals, including
those related to population policy”.
The 1984 conference also called attention to the
large “unmet needs for family planning” among
couples who wanted to limit or space child-bearing
but lacked access to contraception, and noted that
those needs would rise sharply as the number of
reproductive-age couples grew in the decade ahead.
The 1992 United Nations Conference on
Environment and Development identified rapid
population growth as a serious obstacle to sustainable
development. But there was no consensus on actions
to address it, in part because of lingering distrust of
family planning programmes.
This impasse was broken at Cairo by linking development
goals to human rights and the advancement
of women.
REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS. During the two decades
prior to 1994, a number of international forums had broken new ground in elaborating human rights,
including the rights to development and health,
women’s rights and reproductive decision-making.
The ICPD put these together, elaborating a new
concept of reproductive rights.
Reproductive rights broadly encompass the right
to reproductive and sexual health, throughout the life
cycle; reproductive self-determination, including the rights
to voluntary choice in marriage, and to have the
information and means to determine the number,
timing and spacing of one’s children; equality and equity
for women and men in all spheres of life; and sexual
and reproductive security, including freedom from sexual
violence and coercion.(3) These were spelled out in a
variety of human rights treaties and conventions
and international consensus agreements.
In the run-up to the ICPD, reproductive rights
proponents in governments and civil society, particularly
women’s groups, mobilized to ensure that these
understandings would underpin the new plan of action
to address population and development concerns.
The 2003 UNFPA global survey found that since
the ICPD, 131 countries had changed national policies
or laws, or made institutional changes to recognize
reproductive rights. For example, South Africa and
Venezuela include reproductive rights in their constitutions
as fundamental human rights. India’s human
rights commission has adopted a declaration on reproductive
rights and directed state governments to
promote and protect them.(4)
In Ecuador, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya and Liberia,
among other countries, NGOs such as women’s
lawyers’ organizations promote and monitor government
actions supporting reproductive rights.
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| ICPD ON REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS |
[R]eproductive rights embrace certain human rights that are already recognized in national laws,
international human rights documents and other consensus documents. These rights rest on the recognition of the basic right of all couples and individuals to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing and timing of their children and to have the information and means to do so, and the right to attain the highest standard of sexual and reproductive health. It also includes their right to make decisions concerning reproduction free of discrimination, coercion and violence, as expressed in human rights documents. In the exercise of this right, they should take into account the needs of their living and future children and their responsibilities towards the community. The promotion of the responsible exercise of these rights for all people should be the fundamental basis for government- and community-supported policies and programmes in the area of reproductive health, including family planning. |
| —from ICPD Programme of Action, para. 7.3 |
ABORTION COMPROMISE. Broad agreement was
reached on most elements of the Programme of Action
in lengthy preparatory meetings. But at the Cairo
conference itself, the widely reported disagreement
over how to address the abortion issue threatened
to block the consensus.
After prolonged debate, a compromise was
reached. The 1984 International Conference on
Population had agreed that abortion should never be
promoted as a means of family planning, that women
should be helped to avoid abortion through improved access to family planning, and that those who have
had recourse to abortion need humane treatment and
counselling. The 1994 Programme of Action reaffirmed
these points. Acknowledging that unsafe abortion(5) is a
major public health concern, it added that women
should have access to quality services for managing
complications of abortion. Abortion policy, governments
agreed, is a matter for national decisionmaking;
where abortion is not against the law, it
should be safe.
The 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in
Beijing upheld the Cairo action plan and reproductive
rights as central to the agenda for advancing gender
equality. Beijing elaborated on the concept of sexual
security, specifying that “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.”
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