Main description:

Reproductive Health and Human Rights: The Way Forward critically reflects on the past fifteen years of international efforts aimed at improving health, alleviating poverty, diminishing gender inequality, and promoting human rights. The volume includes essays by leading scholars and practitioners that are centered on the 1994 United Nations International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) and its resulting Programme of Action. ICPD, an agreement among 179 governments, UN agencies, and NGOs, was intended to shape population and development policy-reinterpreted and redefined as "reproductive health." More than a decade after the enthusiasm that accompanied ICPD, there is growing concern about its effectiveness in the context of global health and development. Reproductive Health and Human Rights addresses that concern.

The book grapples with fundamental questions about the relationships among population, fertility decline, reproductive health, human rights, poverty alleviation, and development and assesses the various arguments-demographic, public health, human rights-based, and economic-for and against ICPD today.

A number of the chapters address institutional challenges to ICPD and consider how the changing political, religious, academic, and disciplinary contexts matter. Other chapters engage operational and conceptual issues and whether ICPD has been able to move the reproductive health agenda forward on topics such as maternal mortality, abortion, HIV/AIDS, adolescents, reproductive technologies, and demography. Finally, several chapters examine how ICPD has been sidelined by emerging health and development agendas and what could be done in response. Unlike any book yet published, Reproductive Health and Human Rights: The Way Forward examines the state of the arguments for reproductive health and rights from a multidisciplinary perspective that provides policymakers, scholars, and activists with a better understanding of how reproductive health and rights have developed, their place in the global policy agenda, and how they might evolve most effectively in the future.

Contents:

Preface

PART I: GLOBAL AGENDAS AND POPULATION AND DEVELOPMENT PERSPECTIVES

1. Global Reproductive Health and Rights: Reflecting on ICPD

-Mindy Jane Roseman and Laura Reichenbach

2. The Global Reproductive Health and Rights Agenda: Opportunities and Challenges for the Future

-Laura Reichenbach

3. The Conundrum of Population and Reproductive Health Programs in the Early Twenty-First Century

-George Zeidenstein

4. Population, Poverty Reduction, and the Cairo Agenda

-David E. Bloom and David Canning

5. Mobilizing Resources for Reproductive Health

-Tom W. Merrick

6. Measuring Reproductive Health: From Contraceptive Prevalence to Human Development Indicators

-Joan Kaufman

PART II: HUMAN RIGHTS REALIZATIONS

7. Bearing Human Rights: Maternal Health and the Promise of ICPD

-Mindy Jane Roseman

8. Advocacy Strategies for Young People's Sexual and Reproductive Health: Using UN Processes

-Bonnie Shepard

9. Approaches to Sexual and Reproductive Health and HIV Policies and Programs: Synergies and Disconnects

-Sofia Gruskin

10. Technology, Reproductive Health, and the Cairo Consensus

-Kelly Blanchard

11. The Cairo "Compromise" on Abortion and Its Consequences for Making Abortion Safe and Legal

-Marge Berer

PART III: CHALLENGES TO INSTITUTIONALIZING REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH AND RIGHTS

12. Advocacy for Sexuality and Women's Rights: Continuities, Discontinuities, and Strategies Since ICPD

-Francoise Girard

13. Situating Reproductive Health Within the Academy

-Alaka Basu

14. The Political Limits of the United Nations in Advancing Reproductive Health and Rights

-Heidi Larson and Michael R. Reich

15. Examining Religion and Reproductive Health: Constructive Engagement for the Future

-Frances Kissling

16. Conclusion: Conceptual Successes and Operational Challenges to ICPD: Global Reproductive Health and Rights Moving Forward

-Rebecca Firestone, Laura Reichenbach, and Mindy Jane Roseman

Notes

Bibliography

List of Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments