After two weeks of fierce negotiations at the United Nations’ annual Commission on the Status of Women, on March 15 more than 130 governments committed to ending violence against women and girls, and reached strong agreements to promote gender equality and ensure access to sexual and reproductive health services.

The International Women’s Health Coalition and our amazing partners from around the world came out in force to the UN for the negotiations. Our agenda was clear: push governments to commit to concrete strategies to empower women and girls and end gender-based violence.

We met with instant opposition from conservative governments. Countries such as Iran, Russia, Egypt, and Syria joined with the Vatican in what The New York Times called “an unholy alliance.” IWHC staff and our women’s rights caucus of more than 100 activists worked around the clock to support progressive delegations to stand strong and not to cave in to pressure. We would not let a small but vocal minority use culture and religion as excuses to deny women their rights.

Our efforts prevailed and consensus was finally reached to loud applause from supportive governments such as Argentina, Brazil, Denmark, Mexico, Norway, the Philippines, South Africa, Switzerland, Turkey, United States, Uruguay, and even the small island of Tonga! As the “agreed conclusions” document was adopted, hundreds of women’s rights activists streamed into the negotiating room to join in the cheers.

For the first time at the UN, governments reached consensus that survivors of rape are entitled to emergency contraception to prevent unwanted pregnancy, and to timely and respectful forensic exams to support prosecution. They called for an end to child marriages. They agreed women’s right to control their sexuality is essential to preventing further violence. And they recognized the role that evidence-based sexuality education can play in reducing the harmful gender stereotypes that lead to violence.

In a sign of just how much was at stake, this year’s meeting received an unprecedented amount of media coverage after the Muslim Brotherhood condemned (and mischaracterized) the negotiations. IWHC featured prominently in many news articles, including in The Washington Post, The Guardian, Associated Press, ABC News, The Globe and Mail, Radio Free Europe, O Estado de S. Paulo, and Reuters.

Once again, we women have shown we’re an irresistible force. But our work is far from over. Now we must be vigilant to ensure that the agreements made at the UN are put into practice in local communities worldwide.

For that to happen, we must continue to support women’s groups to hold their own leaders to account.

Best regards,

Despite the highly gendered nature of the HIV/AIDS pandemic (women represent well over half of all people living with HIV worldwide), most prevention and treatment programming fails to account for the social determinants—violence against women, limited access to sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services, early and forced marriage, etc.—which make women and girls particularly vulnerable to the virus.

The International Women’s Health Coalition believes that effectively curbing the spread of HIV/AIDS relies fundamentally on the integration of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) with HIV/AIDS programming. The post-2015 development agenda must address the particular susceptibility of women and girls to HIV as well as the fundamental role that gender inequality plays in the spread of the virus.

Integrating SRH and HIV/AIDS services is a proven strategy for reducing new infections.   When men and women have access to HIV testing and treatment in the same spaces they seek out family planning and maternal health services, they are more likely to find out their status, learn about prevention methods, and explore treatment options.

Research has also shown that the availability of HIV services alongside other SRH services can reduce the stigma typically associated with HIV-specific programs.  Because the availability of treatment services for other STIs has been proven to reduce new HIV infections, expanding access to all forms of contraception and sexual health services through voluntary, rights-based, client-centered, and cost-effective programming is imperative.

Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) should equip young people with protective sexual behaviors, the skills to effectively use condoms and other contraceptive methods, and should address gender and power, human rights and healthy relationships.  While male and female condom use is proven to reduce new HIV infections, the distribution of condoms alone is not a sufficient prevention method.  CSE should ensure that young people know how to use condoms correctly and should equip girls in particular with the tools to negotiate condom use and refuse unwanted sex.

In addition to equipping young people with scientifically sound and culturally appropriate information about sexuality, health, and rights, CSE should introduce empowering life skills to help young people navigate healthy and rewarding relationships, influence leaders in their community, and exercise their rights.

It is critical to invest in prevention efforts that target the most at-risk and overlooked populations of women and girls—adolescent girls, married girls and women, sex workers and women who use drugs. We must also ensure that treatment options are available and accessible to those living with HIV/AIDS, and that prevention and treatment efforts do not infringe on the rights of women living with the virus.

Women living with HIV/AIDS have a number of unique needs, and are particularly vulnerable to coercive sterilization practices, violence and discrimination.  They still often provide the bulk of care and support for their families, they face unmet need for contraception, and they need support to prevent vertical transmission.

Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission efforts play an important role in reducing new HIV infections, but these programs tend to focus far more attention on the infant than the mother.  The rights of HIV positive mothers must be fully protected and realized, including the right to informed consent and to choose the treatment regimens that best meet their needs.

The post-2015 development agenda must commit to addressing HIV/AIDS through targeted evidence-based prevention and treatment methods that account for the unique needs of women and girls.  Curbing the spread of HIV hinges on the transformation of discriminatory gender norms and practices, and the expansion of SRHR programming and policies. When women are able to refuse sex, live free from violence, insist on condom use, and avoid early marriage, they are able to reduce their risk of HIV infection (not to mention attend school, participate in civic affairs, and engage in healthy and respectful relationships).

Like so many of our development priorities, addressing the HIV/AIDS pandemic is inherently linked to issues of gender equality.  We must focus not only on the direct determinants of HIV infection, but also the profound gender inequalities and resulting discriminatory practices which make women more vulnerable to the virus and which stand squarely in the way of addressing its spread.

Young people all over the world face a range of unique challenges to exercising their rights.  Barriers to age-appropriate health services, meaningful education, and viable livelihoods opportunities are among the most pressing impediments to youth empowerment.

The International Women’s Health Coalition is centrally concerned with the sexual and reproductive health and rights of young people.  We believe that working with both young men and women is critical to ensuring that the rights of all young people, particularly girls, are universally protected and realized. The following contribution focuses specifically on the challenges facing girls, who continue to experience systematic social, economic and political marginalization in every part of the world.

Given the global persistence of gender inequality, many of the issues disproportionately affecting young people also tend to disproportionately affect girls. In 1997, UNAIDS reported that 60% of new HIV infections in sub-Saharan Africa were among young people (aged 15-24), with a 2:1 ratio of infected girls to infected boys.  This ratio continues to grow increasingly lopsided, with girls representing 74% of new infections among young people in 2009.

Additionally, girls face extraordinarily high rates of violence.  The experience of violence, the perceived threat of violence, or the stigma associated with being a victim of violence hinder access to entitlements, opportunities for social participation, and employment.

In developing countries, 40% of girls have their first child before the age of twenty, many before the age of 18. Not only does this mean that more girls are dropping out of school, but girls are also more likely than adults to die, experience complications, or suffer chronic injuries related to childbirth. Because they have less access to contraceptives and are less sexually experienced, adolescents are more likely than adults to seek out unsafe (often late-term) abortions.  Each year, it is estimated that 2 million to 4.4 million adolescents in developing countries have abortions, 70,000 unsafe abortions are carried out, and 13% of all maternal deaths occur as a result of unsafe abortion.

Early pregnancy is often associated with child marriage, a practice which also puts girls at increased risk of HIV infection.  Female genital mutilation, infanticide, nutritional bias—these and other harmful traditional practices disproportionately affect girls, infringing on their fundamental rights and opportunities for development.

The short answer to why these inequalities exist is that girls, especially the most vulnerable girls, continue to remain invisible. Despite the aforementioned figures, policymakers have consistently masked the specific needs of girls within “male-focused and male-dominated community-based activities and generic ‘youth’ prevention initiatives, all of which widely miss the mark” (Bruce, Temin, & Hallman, 2012).  This generic youth programming disproportionately benefits boys over girls overall, but it also favors unmarried to married girls, well-connected to socially marginalized girls, urban to rural girls, girls belonging to an ethnic majority to migrant or indigenous girls, and so on.

Girls also remain invisible because of how we measure progress.  Primary education enrollment figures, for example, are based on one day of the school year; even if there were genuine parity on this particular day, these figures fail to account for the reality that girls often miss multiple days of school each week because their domestic and reproductive responsibilities take priority.  Moreover, data on young people is rarely disaggregated, resulting in measures of participation which fail to report gender, age, marital status, and other critical factors.

The disproportionate burden that girls share for maternal morbidity and mortality, the time burdens that girls shoulder, the staggering inequalities in girls’ educational outcomes—these are all reversible realities. To tackle these disparities, we need to begin by making girls visible.  We must call for the post-2015 agenda to pay particular attention to girls and the challenges that they face.  The risks facing girls are well documented and the next step is to match the research with the necessary resources.

We need to make girls visible.

Making girls visible begins with how we count them.  By properly counting girls and disaggregating data by age and gender, we can target youth programming at specific subsets of youth—like adolescent girls.  We can also measure whether programs are actually reaching the girls who are most at risk.

We need to invest in girls.

We must invest in programming aimed specifically at girls, with an emphasis on the most at-risk populations of girls—those who engage in transactional sex, those who are forced into early marriage, those who fluently speak their native language but cannot communicate in their national language, and so on.  These programs must include the following features.

• Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) must be thorough, scientifically sound, and culturally appropriate.  It should take place in a safe and healthy learning environment and it should explicitly address gender norms and gender equality.  When young people are educated about human rights, gender equality, and the role of power in relationships, they are not only equipped with the tools to negotiate their own health relationships, but they are also able to educate and influence power-brokers in their communities.
• Comprehensive services must be universally available and accessible.  This means, access to high quality sexual and reproductive health care, all forms of safe and effective contraception, safe abortion and post abortion care, maternity care, and prevention and treatment of sexually transmitted infections including HIV.
• Education is foundational to girls’ empowerment. We must ensure that all girls, no matter how poor, isolated or disadvantaged, are able to attend school regularly and without the interruption of early pregnancy, forced marriage, etc.  Education—for both girls and boys—must go beyond academics and equip young people with life skills so that they are prepared to think critically and challenge discriminatory and repressive policies and practices.
• Empowering spaces ensure girls have the opportunity to feel secure, be themselves, and plan for their safety and development.  Even if only for a few hours a week, accessing safe spaces allows girls to frame their own agendas, receive training on sexual and reproductive health and rights, and develop their social and economic capital. These participatory social spaces also foster opportunities for community-building and networking, mitigating the isolation that many girls experience.

We need to support young leaders.

We must continue to support both young women and young men to be advocates for change. Ensuring that reproductive rights are protected and promoted rests in the hands of young women and men, particularly young people throughout the global South.  Young people should be involved in all types of decision making on sexual and reproductive health and rights.  Seasoned advocates must be willing to pass the torch, share best practices, and work alongside—sometimes even be led by—a new generation of SRHR leaders.

As advocates, we can listen to one another and work in tandem to repeal legislation that legitimizes discrimination against girls and press for new protections that ensure equality of access to health services, jobs and earnings, education, property and all the rest.  Addressing the profoundly complex root causes of gender inequality (and accordingly the inequalities experienced by girls) is not a simple challenge.

As we begin to develop a tangible action plan for the post-2015 development framework, we must remain mindful that shifting the social and cultural norms that permit and promote discrimination against girls is not a simple box-ticking task. We cannot continue to view gender equality as a singular aim, but rather as both an explicit goal and an issue that needs to be mainstreamed throughout the post-2015 development agenda.

As I reported previously, the ICPD Global Youth Forum in Bali earlier this month brought passionate engagement by young people committed to securing a healthy and just life for youth worldwide. The Forum closed on December 6 with a celebratory reading of the key recommendations from the various multi-stakeholder consultations that took place related to five themes: Staying Healthy, Education, Decent Work, Youth Leadership and Participation, and Families, Rights, and Sexuality.

The key recommendations are included in a public declaration. Please take a look and share your thoughts with us. We here at the International Women’s Health Coalition are thrilled that young people and adult allies from governments, civil society, the private sector, multilateral agencies, and other stakeholders from around the world spoke out in support of a bold and progressive vision for what the global community must do in partnership with youth to achieve the largest generation ever of educated, empowered, safe, and healthy young people.

Only by working together as a global community and as individuals can we realize this bold and achievable vision of what young people want, need, and deserve. UNFPA Executive Director Dr. Babatunde Osotimehin rightly described the process of meeting the sexual and reproductive health and human rights of young people as “a journey of 1,000 miles [that] starts with the first step.”

We look forward to working with and on behalf of young people to realize the key recommendations contained in the Bali Declaration, including with UNFPA which did an exemplary job ensuring that the process remained youth-led and youth-driven. We simply cannot progress as communities and nations without continuing to make these important leaps forward on our collective journey of 1,000 miles to secure an educated, empowered, safe, and healthy future for all.

Will you join us?

The last couple of days of the ICPD Global Youth Forum in Bali, Indonesia, have seen a flurry of around-the-clock activity by nearly 1,000 young people, adult allies, NGO representatives, academics, government officials, and other stakeholders from around the world. Their hard work is already paying off.

Yesterday, forum participants developed a number of “Staying Healthy” recommendations to ensure that governments prioritize programs that empower vulnerable young populations, including young women and adolescent girls, LGBTQI individuals, persons with disabilities, and young people living with HIV and AIDS. These recommendations are progressive, measurable, and based on evidence.

The journey has not always been easy. A small, but vocal, opposition made up of non-youth participants have attempted to intimidate and censor young people during this forum. Many people could easily have been intimidated into silence by this group, but thankfully the youth at the Global Forum refused to back down. There is too much at stake.

The “Staying Healthy” recommendations were developed as part of a consultative process following a lively plenary. In his speech, UNFPA Executive Director Dr. Babatunde Osotimehin encouraged young people to continue questioning the status quo, stating that young people are not only the present but the future. He discussed a number of issues impacting the sexual and reproductive health and rights of young people, including meaningful participation, gender equality, ending early and forced marriage, unintended pregnancy, maternal mortality, and the needs of both married and unmarried adolescents. Osotimehin described the process of meeting the sexual and reproductive health and human rights of young people as “A journey of 1,000 miles [that] starts with the first step.”

Indonesian Health Minister Nafsiah Mboi also spoke at the plenary and was met with rousing applause when she stated that, “We have the responsibility to fulfill and promote the health and human rights of young people,” that, “Young people need to be empowered in all aspects of their life,” and that, “It is a fundamental human right of adolescents and youth to access comprehensive sexual and reproductive health education and services.” In Indonesia, there are more than 65 million young people aged between 15 and 24 years old and only 21 percent of them have comprehensive knowledge regarding HIV/AIDS. Sexual transmission of HIV accounts for the vast proportion of new HIV infections among young people and unmarried girls cannot access contraception. Despite these facts, Mboi stated she believes that “The government has an obligation to provide education and services on sexual and reproductive health that are equitable, affordable, and accessible.” For the tens of millions of Indonesian young people in need of information, services, and protection of their human rights, we are optimistic when she says that “You can count on me, I won’t let you down.”

I am thrilled that the final consolidated “Staying Healthy” recommendations articulate a clear, comprehensive, and human-rights based vision as to where the global community needs to focus attention and resources to secure the health and human rights of all young people, and in particular the most marginalized and vulnerable which include adolescent girls and LGBTQI individuals.

These young forum participants deserve our applause for remaining steadfast that this must remain a youth-led and youth-driven process. They stood strong as did UNFPA, which made it clear in various ways that this is indeed intended to be a youth-led and youth-driven process. Displeased with the final consensus recommendations consolidated from the 15 Staying Healthy breakout sessions, the vocal minority of non-youth unconstructively confronted forum participants, after the recommendations were presented during the plenary. During my own breakout session, this same minority consistently opposed suggestions concerning individual rights, and access to safe abortion and contraception.

In contrast to this small group, many other government and non-youth forum participants from around the world stood out as great allies to the youth participants in support of this set of recommendations. The final “Staying Healthy” recommendations will be released as part of a consolidated set of recommendations including the other forum themes: “Decent Work,” “Sexuality, Family and Rights,” “Education,” and “Leadership and Meaningful Participation.” We at the International Women’s Health Coalition look forward to sharing the final recommendations with you when they are released. Stay tuned!

A “can-do” atmosphere prevailed. Hosts Melinda Gates and Andrew Mitchell, the UK Minister for International Development, made significant new pledges of funding for family planning in the poorest countries. For Gates, this was an additional 560 million USD over 8 years, and for the UK’s international development arm, DFID, an additional 800 million USD over the same period.  Prime Minister David Cameron gave by far the most rousing speech outlining his personal commitment to women’s rights and to ensuring that the fight for women’s empowerment is at the core of the post-2015 development framework that will replace the current Millennium Development Goals.  Importantly, Cameron co-chairs the UN Panel of Eminent Persons tasked with developing this new framework.

High-level government officials and heads of State, from India to Uganda, announced increased support, financial and programmatic. Some couched this support in terms of “Family Planning,” given the topic chosen by the organizers. Many, particularly from African governments, mindful of national programs and their own commitments to the now 18-year-old agreement reached at the International Conference on Population and Development, insisted on “sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights” and a full package of services and information rather than a stand alone investment that would reinforce siloed approaches. Providing adolescent girls with information and services was highlighted as a key intervention; when 2/5 of girls in Sierra Leone have their first child between the ages of 12 and 14, that is indeed an urgent need.

All well and good — but for those of us trying to discern whether the rights of women will truly be at the center of this Family Planning Initiative, as promised by DFID and the Gates Foundation in response to our months of advocacy, there were moments of disquiet.  Several speakers made it clear that their national plans involved hard targets for increasing the number of users of contraception, rather than simply making contraception available and accessible, which the ostensible goal of the Summit. For example, the representatives of Indonesia and Bangladesh spoke in terms of achieving certain ambitious contraceptive prevalence rates and total fertility rates – thus raising the very real possibility that coercion might result without safeguards. The Additional Secretary of Health of India outlined her government’s plan for post-partum IUDs for the 12 million women who deliver in institutions. These women are routinely discharged very quickly after childbirth – how much time will they have to decide whether to “accept” an IUD in these conditions?

Then, at the side session on Monitoring and Accountability in late afternoon, we heard for the first time that something about this Initiative was going to be hard to do: providing 120 million women with access to services in some of the poorest countries on earth? No. Ensuring a reliable supply of contraceptives in faraway places? No. What was going to be hard to do was “measuring human rights.” Evidently, the members of the Initiative’s Monitoring & Accountability Working Group at work need to familiarize themselves with the extensive quality of care and human rights literature on the subject, notably that produced by the Population Council and the World Health Organization. It would certainly help if representatives of women’s groups and of human rights groups were invited to join this Working Group, for a start.

The human rights of women must be measured when one is spending $4.6 billion on an initiative that is supposed to, precisely, uphold their rights. Measuring whether there is coercion in services is not hard to do. Measuring whether this is a wide range of methods available is not hard to do. Measuring whether women are satisfied with the services they receive is not hard to do. If programs do not measure these and other aspects of human rights and quality of care, however, they will send a clear message that the human rights of women are a distraction, and that something else is more important – controlling that pesky African fertility, perhaps? Let’s see whether the Initiative measures up to its claims.

“And hey presto, I didn’t have to worry about getting pregnant!”

I was among the first generation of women in the 1960s to experience the miracle of the pill just at the age when I was wanting to start having sex. All I had to do was take a pill every day, I was told, and hey presto, I didn’t have to worry about getting pregnant if I didn’t want to, and it worked! But oh, if only it had all turned out to be that easy!  Like one in three women in the UK today, a country where contraceptive prevalence is almost as high as it can get, I needed an abortion several years later.  Again, I was lucky, the 1967 Abortion Act meant I was able to get a legal abortion. The lesson is simple – while contraception continues to be a miracle, because it helps people not to have children if and when they don’t want to, it is not enough on its own and it never has been.

Family planning has been out of the news for a long time, and suddenly it’s back. Welcome!! Bring out the red carpet, and I mean it!! Women and men need contraception  now as much as they have ever done, and young women and men who are beginning to explore their sexuality together need contraception and condoms more than anyone.  But there has been a lot of water under the bridge since family planning was promoted as the cure-all for the world’s ills in the 1960s when the pill came out, and everyone needs to study that history anew so that the same mistakes, of which there have been many, and the same narrow vision, are not repeated.

My generation of women’s health activists, along with a whole generation of researchers, service providers and policymakers who brought their knowledge together at the International Conference on Population and Development in 1994, got the world to recognise that the need for the means to control fertility, which is as old as history itself, was part of a much broader set of needs related to reproduction and sexuality, and that these were inextricably connected. These include: being able to have sex without fear of negative outcomes, being able to have sex if and only if we want to and only with whom we want to, being able to have the children we want, being able to get pregnant at all, being able not only to survive pregnancy but also still be in good health, being able to have a safe abortion without fear of death or condemnation when an unwanted pregnancy occurs, being able to protect ourselves from sexually transmitted diseases, and being able to get treatment for all the many causes of reproductive and sexual ill-health, which start with menstruation and menstrual problems, and continue into old age with things like breast and prostate cancer and uterine prolapse.

There is indeed a huge unmet need in today’s world, but the unmet need for contraception is only a fraction of the unmet need for sexual and reproductive health, and for sexual and reproductive rights. The results we should be working for encompass every aspect of the issues I have just named, and those in turn must be seen in the even wider context of the right to health, social justice and an end to poverty and violence – which were the real point of the Millennium Development Goals – not the measurable targets.

I will be blogging about these issues in the light of the FP Summit over the next few weeks at http://bererblog.wordpress.com – watch this space!

Marge Berer
Editor, Reproductive Health Matters

Brazil, a country that in the past has championed women’s human rights, including reproductive rights, at the global level, has failed women in both Brazil and the world over.

During meetings to finalize the Rio+20 document, Heads of State will adopt in the next few days at Rio+20, delegates agreed on a plan short on vision and big on compromises. After three days of long, drawn-out negotiations, marked with lack of clarity about the process, a document to be signed off by heads of government was presented. Quickly gaveled through by the Brazilian chair, one after another government thanked Brazil for facilitating this document and largely expressed how this was the best they could do. By all accounts, despite the attempts to spin the outcome as a success, this document is neither “the future we want” nor what future generations deserve. In an effort to get consensus at whatever cost, Brazil forgot Rio: the vision and commitments of the Rio Earth Summit held 20 years ago.

From the start of the negotiations, gender equality and women’s human rights, including reproductive rights, have continuously been challenged by a few governments, claiming that [these] had “nothing to do with sustainable development.”

This debate continued until the last few hours of the negotiations. In the end, the text includes a re-affirmation of both the Cairo and Beijing agreements, but it falls short by failing to recognize that reproductive rights are also critical to the achievement of sustainable development. If a woman cannot decide if and when to have children and if she is not provided with the reproductive health care that is her human right, it is challenging to contribute to sustainable solutions for the planet.

Opposition to women’s human rights per se was concentrated among a few countries, with the un-holy alliance of the Holy See and oppressive governments such as Syria and Egypt insisting on marginalizing women. And since there was so much at stake for “more important issues,” such as trade, financing for sustainable development, and the green economy, other governments in the end traded away women’s reproductive rights, giving the Vatican what it wanted in the first place. But even if reproductive rights had been reaffirmed, the lack of real commitment by the international community to eradicate poverty, address urgent environmental concerns, and to chart a clear path for implementation of sustainable development, makes it difficult for women– and for the world — to  achieve gender equality and women’s empowerment in this context.

Norway, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Peru, Bolivia, Uruguay, Mexico, Iceland, Switzerland, Israel and many others fought to the end to retain the reference to reproductive rights and expressed disappointment that this was not incorporated in the final text. However, it is expected that they will speak of their continued commitment through their leaders during the High Level Segment that begins today.

The Brazilian failure: selling out women’s human rights in this negotiation, has not gone unnoticed. Brazilian feminists quickly mobilized and demanded an explanation from their government. In an interview with local media following the agreement on the text, the Brazilian Foreign Minister expressed disappointment that “reproductive rights” had been kept out of the document, but went on to explain that this was done out of the need to reach a compromise. Immediately following the adoption of the text, women gathered and protested at Rio Centro, the main venue for the conference, chanting “reproductive rights are not for sale”, “governments have failed women and the planet” and “women’s rights are human rights.” Finally, in a meeting with Michelle Bachelet, the head of UNWomen, and the Brazilian Minister for the Environment, Brazilian women presented their declaration to Rio+20 which fittingly ended with these words:

“We defend women’s rights to equality, autonomy and freedom in all the territories where we live, particularly in our bodies, which are our first territory.”

For now, governments attending Rio+20 have failed both territories.

Women wave scarves at Rio+20 protest. Photo courtesy of the Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development (APWLD).

Contraceptive information and services – “family planning” – form an essential part of the health services that women need throughout their lives. Any steps to increase demand for contraceptives must actively support efforts to improve comprehensive and integrated sexual and reproductive health. Contraceptives must be provided through primary healthcare, with full regard for women’s human rights and the specific needs of young and unmarried women and other groups.

Our experience, built over decades of work around the world, has taught us that the failure to take actions guided by women’s human rights – to health, to life, to live free from discrimination among others – can have devastating consequences. Policies that accept or tacitly condone forced sterilization, the coercive provision of contraceptives, and the denial of essential services to the young, poor and marginalized women that need them every day have violated, and continue to violate, women’s human rights.

Nearly twenty years ago, governments at the International Conference on Population and Development agreed that respect for women’s reproductive autonomy is the cornerstone of population policy. Any return to coercive family planning programs where quality of care and informed consent are ignored would be both shocking and retrograde. The Family Planning Summit must ensure that the clocks are not put back on women’s human rights: women’s autonomy and agency to decide freely on matters related to sexual and reproductive health without any discrimination, coercion or violence must be protected under all circumstances.

In order to expand contraceptive access with full respect for women’s human rights, we urge governments, donors and other actors supporting the Family Planning Summit to:

• Take all possible measures to ensure that this initiative is designed with quality of care and human rights at its core, so that no coercive measures are introduced in the provision of contraceptives;
• Ensure that meaningful participation by women, including young women, is built into all stages of program design and implementation to ensure that services are responsive to their needs and to prevent any human rights violations;
• Ensure that the provision of contraceptives is integrated into existing and new sexual and reproductive health services, and that a full range of contraceptive methods is offered;
• Design and implement a system for monitoring, evaluation and accountability to track and measure its impact on the human rights of women as this initiative is rolled out, and urgently make necessary corrections should violations come to light;
• Commit to tackling the existing legal and policy barriers that hinder access to contraceptive information and services, without which efforts are likely to be ineffective and exacerbate disparities in access.

In 2012, nothing less will do.

Download a PDF of this statement, along with a list of the signatories, here.