Family welfare minus rights doesn’t work

What are reproductive rights?' is a question as important as its close cousin: What ought to be the range of reproductive rights?' And ...

What are reproductive rights?’ is a question as important as its close cousin: “What ought to be the range of reproductive rights?’ And yet the element of is or ought commingle, resisting efforts at analytic segregation.

What ought to be has been presciently identified by Professor Rebecca Cook as nothing short of a right to “reproductive self-determination”. What we have really, from Tehran to Cairo, Beijing and beyond, are registers of interests and concerns, only some of which assume the form of binding human rights, norms and standards. Accordingly, Professor Cook is justified in speaking about “reproductive interests” (entailing reproductive “security and sexuality, reproductive health, reproductive equality” and “reproductive decision-making”) rather than reproductive rights.

Like all claims to self-determination, reproductive self-determination signals a revolution in the making.

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Initially conceived in the Final Document of the Tehran Conference on Human Rights in 1968 articulating the “basic human right to decide freely and responsibly the number and spacing of children and the right to adequate education and information in this respect”, the languages of reproductive rights have matured with the Cairo Programme which expands the notion to include a right to reproductive health, defined as a “state of complete physical, mental and social well-being.” And the Beijing Platform even further extends the notion of reproductive health to women’s rights “to have control over…to matters relating to their sexuality…free of coercion, discrimination and violence”.

Freedom inherent to reproductive rights entails, for almost all societies, a revolutionary transformation assuring equality of relationship between men and women, “full respect for the integrity of the person, mutual respect, consent and shared responsibility for sexual behaviour and its consequences.” The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) contains a general obligation “to ensure the full development and advancement of women … for the purpose of guaranteeing them the exercise and enjoyment of human rights on a basis of equality with men.”…

Against this backdrop, I now attend to your expectation concerning my views on the Indian National Population Policy, 2000. It is indeed a most remarkable formulation, which in my opinion ought to influence the implementation of other older statements of national policy….

My evaluation of the NPP may at times seem even hypercritical but I offer it by way of exercise of my fundamental duties as an Indian citizen…The NPP’s understanding of high population growth traverses the familiar ground. The expanding numbers in the reproductive age groups contribute 58 per cent, high infant mortality rate, triggering high “wanted fertility”, contributing 20 per cent and “higher fertility rate due to unmet need for contraception” contributes an equal percentage to high population growth….

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The NPP does not speak to the past, except for a celebratory reference to the fact that, “in 1952, India was the first country in the world to launch a national programme, emphasizing family planning”….

The erasure of contemporary history of miscarriage of population policy cancels messages that no policy-making action may ignore, even in the proclaimed “continuation of the target-free family planning services…”…That remembrance truly helps us to appreciate the “myth of voluntarism” in Indian population planning, which the Emergency obviously ruptured. In the eye of subaltern history, however, state managed family planning was always coercive….

The NPP also does not even once mention reproductive rights, let alone the notion of reproductive self-determination. At no place in the text do we find a mention of the obligations assumed by India under the two human rights covenants or the CEDAW. But a national policy that does not reflect India’s solemn treaty commitments and obligations raises just citizen anxiety….

Excerpted from Gender and Reproductive Rights: Problems and Prospects in the New Millennium’, a public lecture hosted by UNFPA