Search results

Using data from a multi-method study with a national reproductive justice coalition, this chapter examines the emergence of the US reproductive justice movement. I first examine how reproductive justice emerged in relation to the mainstream women's movements. Then I demonstrate how, due to the relationship between reproductive justice and social identity, the boundaries of the reproductive frame and movements are simultaneously broader and more constrained in meaning than reproductive rights. Finally, I show how (perceived) co-optation leads to tensions between movement sectors and weakens the potential for reproductive justice to reinvigorate activism around reproductive issues. I conclude with how the success of the reproductive justice movement, including around diversity and coalition building, can inform other social movements.

The central objective of this chapter is to develop a theoretical reading of the international and contemporary discourse of reproductive rights. My hope is that the perspective and analytical proposal set forth represent a contribution to the expansion and consolidation of the field of study, and renders useful for the analysis and evaluation of the situation of reproductive rights within national contexts.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the budget of the Indian family planning programme from a human rights perspective. Family planning services play an important role in the realisation of the reproductive rights of women. In India, the family planning programme is one of the largest in the world with thousands of patients, mostly women, accessing services every year. Although the Indian legal system guarantees the right to health, Indian women from marginalised sections of society still battle inadequate services and the absence of health care that respects their right to reproductive autonomy and choice. Therefore, the question is: in the presence of a strong legal framework, what are the factors that contribute to this phenomenon?

The authors have gathered data from the project implementation plans at the state level comparing year-wise expenditure for family planning against overall expenditure for reproductive, maternal and child health expenditure. The data are then compared to the number of women using sterilisation to suggest a relationship between both. Finally, the article relies on desk research to review scholarship on the Indian family planning programme and applicable human rights obligations.

The paper finds that social-economic rights such as the right to health are applicable to government spending and budgeting. It also finds current spending in the NHM is insufficient to guarantee women’s reproductive rights as the vast majority of resources are spend on sterilisation, thus limiting women’s ability to choose the number and spacing of children.

The data used in this research bears one limitation: the propensity of the government to change the guidelines as to how States should present their budgets in the project implementation plans. The authors have adjusted the data so that it remains comparable. However, the adjustment was not possible for all expenditure data, which is why the current study is limited to the family planning programme alone.

The paper argues that to be human rights compliant, health budgets of the NHM need to be geared towards the specific needs of women in terms of family planning. Finally, the article briefly outlines the role played by human rights and human rights litigation in impacting government budgets.

India’s family planning programme has been examined from a performance and medical standpoint, focussing on medical indicators such as total fertility rate, unmet needs for family planning, amongst others. Academic scholarship has investigated through statistical analysis patterns of contraceptive use and contraceptive mix. What is absent, however, is an assessment of the programme from a right-based perspective by looking at the human rights obligations of India and their normative implications for the Indian family programme.

This paper examines the implications of the disability rights critique of prenatal testing on the development of genetic policy and abortion rights. It traces the reappearance of the disabled body in public deliberations over reproductive and genetic politics that use disability to frame arguments about which bodies are worthy of protection, how and why we limit reproductive choices, and what reasons women may use to terminate their pregnancies. The disability critique of prenatal testing and selective abortion finds itself in productive tension with reproductive rights politics, which increasingly features disability in both pro-life and pro-choice messages. The uneasy alliance between disability and pro-life interests has profound implications for both disability legal scholarship and the sociolegal inquiry into the role of rights articulation – and rejection – by social movements.

Reproductive health rights became an issue of interest long before the 1990s. Several policies were created to guarantee reproductive health rights, including birth rights. Women have the right to give birth in a way that is respectful and free from obstetric violence. Policymaking must, of course, be based on empirical evidence, so it is necessary to map studies on human rights in the context of childbirth. This study aims to investigate the viewpoint on human rights during childbirth across time by using a bibliometric methodology.

Bibliometric analysis was conducted using the VOSviewer application. The analysis was sourced from 301 articles on human rights during delivery for the 1976–2023 period from the Scopus database.

The studies concerning reproductive health rights encompass various topics, including reproductive health policy, human rights during childbirth, child marriage and human rights, pandemics and health care related to human rights.

Studies related to human rights in reproductive health (especially childbirth) must be increased. Remember, policymaking must be based on the evidence found. Apart from that, empirical information about harmful actions during childbirth must be revealed so that it becomes a concern. While there has been a significant increase in the establishment of human rights during childbirth, there is a lack of research on this topic specifically in the Asian context. Researchers might consider this to be a matter of concern, given the implications for human rights. Two themes that have citations but a small number relate to obstetric violence and respectful maternity care during childbirth, so this could be a concern for other researchers for further studies.

This paper provides an overview of the most cited topics of human rights during childbirth, contributions by the distribution of studies throughout time, distribution of studies by country, the highest number of publications and citations.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the situation of accessibility to reproductive health rights, and the conditional factors of accessibility to such rights of adolescents.

A qualitative method was used to extract information from 80 informants. Data were collected through in-depth interview, focus group discussion, observation, data recording, audio recording and the review of related documents during August to October 2016.

Adolescents had not accessed to their right on informing of their decision making; information and education; health; confidentiality and privacy; and treating with equity and no discrimination. Also, the conditional factors influenced to the accessibility on such rights were lacking of knowledge on reproductive health and negative attitude toward this matter among the people concerned. There were still no regulations or policies on the performance of authority agencies and the factors on social dimensions, traditions, customs, sexual culture and religion.

The findings from this study would be a help to promote the accessibility for adolescents to reproductive health rights under the Prevention and Solution of Adolescent Pregnancy Problem Act, B.E. 2559 (2016) specific on standard criteria reproductive health services from hospitals and the involvement from Ministry of Education for the development of sex life skill and reproductive health for the teacher.

I begin my historical analysis of the co-evolution of reproductive norms and desires, approaches to fertility control, and the meaning assigned to contraceptives with an examination of the Grafenberg Ring, the first modern IUD. The Grafenberg ring, developed in the late 1920s by a German doctor, Ernst Gräfenberg, was a small ring made of silkworm gut and coiled silver that can be compressed to be inserted into the uterus. The Grafenberg ring appeared at a time when changes in social attitude towards sexuality had formed a favorable climate for a new contraceptive method. The device was greeted with much interest from the European birth control movement, and Gräfenberg was invited to speak at the Third Congress of the World League for Sexual Reform held in London in 1929 and at the Seventh International Birth Control Conference in Zurich in 1930 (Davis, 1971).

How do young members of disadvantaged communities in countries like the United States, which has been affected by political polarisation and attacks from far-right populist politicians on women's rights, make sense of messages on reproductive health in the misinformation age? Following from the conclusion of a Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF)-funded project which examined how 52 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) from across the world are making use of communications tools for advocacy on sexuality and reproductive health (SRHR), this study engaged with communities in Florida, US, in partnership with the NGO Open Arms, to assess how they consume media content on reproductive health, particularly on social media, within a context of proliferation of ‘fake news’.^{3 , 4} Applying a feminist methodological epistemology and a participatory approach which aims to ‘empower’ participants, two focus groups with males and females from diverse ethnicities, between 18 and 40 years of age, were conducted with Open Arms in July and August 2023. Findings revealed how groups are exposed to a lot of inaccurate news, misinformation and ‘myths’ around fertility treatments on the web, and how they feel there is a need for better scientific information on reproductive health in the media and on the internet, one which is also more ‘entertaining’ and which speaks directly to their experiences. This study concludes in favour of improving health literacy approaches as well as communications on reproduction health.

The internally displaced persons (IDPs) are often overlooked population, falling between the cracks of international and national commitments. Displaced women and children go through more hardship than the male counterpart, as they are frequently at greater risk and do not get adequate access to the reproductive healthcare rights; they suffer from poor health amid threats of eviction. The purpose of this paper is to look into the IDPs reproductive healthcare situation in India and sustainable development goal (SDG) role in addressing the reproductive healthcare rights of the IDPs in India.

This paper is based on the available literature on reproductive rights of IDPs in India, analysis of the SDGs 3 and other legal safeguards.

The newly arrived IDPs in the camps have complex needs and health problems. They are susceptible to a number of health problems due to the exposure to physical and environmental threats, violence and trauma. Many of them face a loss of social networks and assets, knowledge and information in the new environment, and lack food security. They have inadequate shelter, healthcare services, sanitation and access to safe water.

This is a viewpoint paper and most of the information in this paper are taken from different sources which are cited in the reference section. There is a lack of sufficient data on IDPs in India. Most of the IDPs figures/data are quoted from Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre and other literature.

To achieve the SDGs by 2030, India needs to take account of all people’s vulnerabilities to address their humanitarian and sustainable development needs. It is important that the development, humanitarian actors, along with the local communities, work collectively to respond to the health needs of the IDPs. Moreover, the active role of the government can provide the necessary assistance to guarantee the rights of IDPs health, adequate standard of living and to social security.

This paper highlights the reproductive healthcare rights of the IDPs in India and the challenges faced by them. It has analyzed the policy gaps. The paper also suggests few measures that can be undertaken to address those challenges under the SDGs.

Derek Parfit’s non-identity problem calls into question the claims of both the state and individuals when they purport to act for the benefit of future children. This paper discusses how adoption of the non-identity argument as a legal argument could affect reproductive and family policy, demonstrating that it undermines the child-centric approach to assigning legal parentage. The paper concludes, however, that these non-identity problems can be solved by the expected value approach, which demonstrates that efforts to benefit future people can be logically coherent even if those efforts also affect the genetic identities of the future people.