News

Women’s health not yet a human right

At least one woman dies every minute worldwide from preventable complications of pregnancy and childbirth. More than a million women and infants die every year from complications of reproductive tract infections. (The estimated annual number of deaths among men from syphilis, chlamydia and gonorrhoea is 20,000.) An estimated two million girls are at risk of female genital mutilation every year.

These were some of the issues due to be discussed by the UN Committee of the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women at its 20th annual session, due to be held as healthmatters went to press.

The meeting was set to consider how to advance the status of women’s right to health, as outlined in article 12 of the 1979 UN Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women.

By the end of last year more than 160 countries had ratified this convention, but 54 states had lodged reservations. The US and two other countries had signed but failed to ratify the agreement.

Developments since 1979 have included the declaration agreed at the 1993 World Conference of Human Rights, that the human rights of girls and women were ‘an inalienable, integral and indivisible part of human rights’ to be protected both in public life and in the privacy of the home.

The 1994 International Conference on Population and Development went on to position reproductive health within the context of human rights and recognised female empowerment as a fundamental precondition to women being able to make informed sexual and reproductive decisions.

Judith Mirsky, founder of the Panos Institute’s reproductive health and gender programme, said it was now time for gender-related deaths and injuries to be identified as ‘violations of universal human rights’.

While women suffer the same breaches of human rights as men, ‘their reproductive function means that they are vulnerable to additional abuses’, she said.

The Panos Institute has called for maternal mortality and sexually transmitted diseases in women to be considered in a legal or social context, to bring women’s basic rights into line with men’s.

Women’s Health: Using Human Rights to Gain Reproductive Rights, a report published to coincide with the 50th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is available from the Panos Institute. Tel: 0171 278 1111.