Rights and advocacy
The sheer number of women dying from childbirth-related causes calls for a human rights approach to safe motherhood. Most of these deaths are preventable. However, policy and intervention have failed to tackle the wider issues that influence maternal and neonatal mortality. Many illnesses and conditions related to pregnancy and childbirth can be linked to gender injustices, such as lack of education, early marriage, lower food intake, and inequitable access to health care and health information.
Human rights declarations and covenants such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) provide protection on paper. The challenge is using human rights to realise safe motherhood objectives.
- Developing a human rights-based approach to addressing maternal mortality
- This paper, published by the DFID Health Resource Centre, looks at how approaches based on human rights could accelerate a reduction in maternal mortality, drawing on evidence from case studies. It argues that, despite fifteen years of the global Safe Motherhood Initiative, maternal mortality rates are still high, and attributes this to the status of women, the systematic violation of women’s human rights, and failing health systems.
Recommended reading
- Advancing safe motherhood through human rights
- ( R.J. Cook; B.M. Dickens; O.A.F. Wilson; S.E. Scarrow / World Health Organization , 2001)
- Recommended reading
- Health system interventions to reduce maternal mortality cannot be implemented without taking account of various social factors affecting pregnancy-related illness and death. It is thought that health...
- Women who die needlessly: maternal mortality as a human rights issue
- ( J. Liljestrand; K. Gryboski / Program for Appropriate Technology in Health , 2002)
- Recommended reading
- Human rights conventions are being increasingly used to fight for the rights of women who die needlessly in childbirth. A human rights strategy can help increase government accountability to provide a...
- Generating political will for safe motherhood in Indonesia
- ( J. Shiffman / Social Science and Medicine , 2003)
- Recommended reading
- If the medical technology is available to prevent maternal deaths in childbirth, why have global maternal mortality levels not declined to any significant degree in the last decade? This paper, publis...
Latest Additions
- Family planning policies should reflect HIV-positive women’s rights for informed reproductive choices
- ( N. Rutenberg;C. Baek / Studies in Family Planning , 2005)
- This article, published in Studies in Family Planning, reviews field experiences of provision of family planning services in prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) programmes in ten countr...
- Are women's human rights being ignored in programmes to prevent mother to child transmission of HIV?
- ( Center for Reproductive Rights, formerly known as the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy, New York , 2005)
- This briefing paper from the Centre for Reproductive Rights examines how women’s human rights need to be central to the development of Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission (PMTCT) programmes. Th...
