Public health vs rights based approaches

Access to protection against unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections is fundamental to sexual and reproductive health and rights. However, realising sexual rights is about more than enabling access to health services and information. Conventional public health and population concerns have dominated negotiations on sexual and reproductive health and rights, with a focus on family planning, targeting married women, rather than on sexuality and sexual rights.

The HIV and AIDS pandemic has also led to an emphasis on sexual risk (violence and disease) rather than on pleasure and freedom (Correa, 2000). Health services have failed to acknowledge sexuality and the sexual rights of different groups, including people living with HIV and AIDS (Berger).

Over the past decade, there has been a move towards integrating the human rights agenda of the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) Plan of Action into public health approaches. This has led to intersectoral collaboration between the fields of law, human rights and reproductive health (PATH). However, in international negotiations on sexual and reproductive rights, the language of health is used in preference to that of human rights (which is deemed more controversial) and there is still a pressing need for greater dialogue and integration between the two approaches (Miller).