The Reproductive Rights Blog

Archive for the ‘Reproductive Rights’ Category

The reproductive rights include the protection of the reproductive health. They state that any person has the right to have free and sound sexual life, without coercion, has the right to decide how many children to have, must have an opportunity to control the birth rate and have access to the information about it and the right to have good health care services, to protect the women and the infants and give a chance to every couple to have healthy children.
The sexual health is one of the constituents of the reproductive health. Its most widely-used definition say that “Sexual health is a state of physical, emotional, mental and social well-being in relation to sexuality; it is not merely the absence of disease, dysfunction or infirmity. Sexual health requires a positive and respectful approach to sexuality and sexual relationships, as well as the possibility of having pleasurable and safe sexual experiences, free of coercion, discrimination and violence. For sexual health to be attained and maintained, the sexual rights of all persons must be respected, protected and fulfilled.”

The problem is that there are no legally accepted definitions of the sexual health in most countries, so it’s hard to work out and adopt laws protecting it. We must work in this direction and have precise definitions of main reproductive rights, internationally recognized, so that the legislation of separate countries have them as the basis of the local laws. This will help to democratize the reproductive rights legislation in many countries and let people all over the world have equal rights.

The reproductive rights, alongside with the right to freedom, privacy and other human rights are the inseparable part of the human rights, but from the point of view of law everything is not so evident, as most of the reproductive rights are rather permissive than mandatory. At the Cairo Conference some of the members of the UN made formal reservations concerning reproductive rights. Peru, Honduras, Argentina and other countries have adopted some variations of the reproductive rights, though only in some of these countries they have a power of official laws.
The program of the Cairo Conference was the first official document, which gave the definition of the reproductive health and rights. It listed the main reproductive rights and tried to give necessary definitions and explanations.

The reproductive rights include:
• the control of birth rate
• the right to have a quality reproductive health care
• the right to have free reproductive choices
• the right to have access to reproductive information
• the right to have safe abortions and as many children as you wish
• protection from coerced sterilization
• protection from offending and harmful ceremonies and rituals, such as genital cutting and coerced defloration.