Use of human rights to meet the unmet need for family planning (original) (raw)
Related papers
Family Planning: A Fundamental Right of Women
International Journal of Science and Healthcare Research, 2021
Family planning is not only a matter of human rights; it is also central to women’s empowerment, reducing poverty and achieving sustainable development. -Dr. Natalia Kanem, Executive Director, UNFPA Family planning is considered a development “best buy” and a life-saving intervention for millions of women and girls. Family Planning 2020 (FP2020) a collaboration at the international level with the help of the UN Global Strategy for Women’s, Children’s and Adolescents’ Health. FP2020: Women at the Center recognizes the rights of women and girls to choose openly whether and when they want to have babies. In order to promote family planning, it is essential for women and couples to ensure access to preferred contraceptive methods to secure one’s well-being and autonomy of women, while supporting the health and development of communities. Keywords: Family Planning, Fundamental, Right, Women.
Reproductive Health Matters, 2007
Unmet need for contraception represents a major failure in the provision of reproductive health services and reflects the extent of access to services for spacing and limiting births, which are also affected by personal, partner, community and health system factors. In the context of the Millennium Development Goals, family planning has been given insufficient attention compared to maternal health and the control of sexually transmitted infections. As this omission is being redressed, efforts should be directed towards ensuring that an indicator of unmet need is used as a measure of access to services. The availability of data on unmet need must also be increased to enable national comparisons and facilitate resource mobilisation. Unmet need is a vital component in monitoring the proportion of women able to space and limit births. Unmet need for contraception is a measure conditioned by people's preferences and choices and therefore firmly introduces a rights perspective into development discourse and serves as an important instrument to improve the sensitivity of policy dialogue. The new reproductive health target and the opportunity it offers to give appropriate attention to unmet need for contraception will allow the entry of other considerations vital to ensuring universal access to reproductive health. A2007 Reproductive Health Matters. All rights reserved.
Access to Basic Reproductive Rights: Global Challenges
The Oxford Handbook of Reproductive Ethics (Francis, L. (ed.), 2015, xx-xx)
It has long been recognised that if women are to have true equality with men they must be able to control the number of children they have and the time of childbirth. There are many factors that impact on this ability but key are access to family planning services, particularly safe contraception and abortion. That is the focus of this chapter. The central premise of our analysis is that access to contraception and abortion are properly understood as basic reproductive rights. Our claim is that to disallow such access is effectively to bar women from attaining equality with men by denying minimal standards of bodily integrity. We argue for access to contraception and abortion as basic reproductive rights because they are necessary to for controlling fertility and childbirth and as such necessary to make women equal to men. Basic reproductive rights should not be ‘trumped’ by other rights or sacrificed or compromised to attain other goods. This chapter is available to be downloaded from this site in pre-publicaton version.
2013
Scaling up access to family planning services over the next decade to reach national and global goals will take the combined efforts of governments; donors; and family planning human rights and women’s health advocates. Voluntary Family Planning Programs that Respect Protect and Fulfill Human Rights: A Conceptual Framework presents a practical approach for realizing human rights as part of voluntary high-quality family planning programming. The framework provides a pathway for voluntary family planning programs to respect protect and fulfill human rights as they set out to improve health and achieve ambitious family planning goals. This comprehensive framework brings together human rights laws and principles with family planning quality of care frameworks to assist policymakers program managers donors and civil society with program design implementation and monitoring and evaluation. This is the first framework to operationalize rights principles and approaches within family plannin...
WOMEN AND REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH RIGHTS- FAMILY PLANNING FACTOR
Abstract The principle of making decision focuses on the individual. However most women’s family planning decision making reflect on a wide range of influences in and outside their immediate environment. Family planning initiatives have been critical to development strategies since the 1950s. Family planning has been justified on various grounds including its contribution to poverty alleviation, improved maternal and infant health and the advancement of women’s rights and choices. More recently, the discourse of ‘women’s empowerment’ has been used in the advocacy of family planning. Studies have showed that there is a low patronage of family planning service provided by the various outlets in Ghana. There are ranges of factors contributing to this low patronage. This include spousal disapproval on use of family planning service and well as the rights uphold by women to use contraceptives without any external disagreement. This review will focus on reproductive health rights and other relevant issues pertain to family planning decision making among women with the view to enhance women empowerment in respect to family planning decision making in the country.
Family planning: the unfinished agenda
Lancet, 2006
Promotion of family planning in countries with high birth rates has the potential to reduce poverty and hunger and avert 32% of all maternal deaths and nearly 10% of childhood deaths. It would also contribute substantially to women's empowerment, achievement of universal primary schooling, and long-term environmental sustainability. In the past 40 years, family-planning programmes have played a major part in raising the prevalence of contraceptive practice from less than 10% to 60% and reducing fertility in developing countries from six to about three births per woman. However, in half the 75 larger low-income and lower-middle income countries (mainly in Africa), contraceptive practice remains low and fertility, population growth, and unmet need for family planning are high. The cross-cutting contribution to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals makes greater investment in family planning in these countries compelling. Despite the size of this unfinished agenda, international funding and promotion of family planning has waned in the past decade. A revitalisation of the agenda is urgently needed. Historically, the USA has taken the lead but other governments or agencies are now needed as champions. Based on the sizeable experience of past decades, the key features of effective programmes are clearly established. Most governments of poor countries already have appropriate population and family-planning policies but are receiving too little international encouragement and funding to implement them with vigour. What is currently missing is political willingness to incorporate family planning into the development arena.
Bulletin of The World Health Organization, 2010
This paper describes the development of a tool that uses human rights concepts and methods to improve relevant laws, regulations and policies related to sexual and reproductive health. This tool aims to improve awareness and understanding of States' human rights obligations. It includes a method for systematically examining the status of vulnerable groups, involving non-health sectors, fostering a genuine process of civil society participation and developing recommendations to address regulatory and policy barriers to sexual and reproductive health with a clear assignment of responsibility. Strong leadership from the ministry of health, with support from the World Health Organization or other international partners, and the serious engagement of all involved in this process can strengthen the links between human rights and sexual and reproductive health, and contribute to national achievement of the highest attainable standard of health.