Repoliticising sexual and reproductive health and rights

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Notes

* Berer M, Shameem S, Allotey PAA. Are recent international conferences advancing sexual and reproductive health and rights? (Unpublished paper, in Langkawi report, Annex 1. (See fn ^* page 5 for reference).

† Even though for most of us at that meeting women's rights and needs have historically been the motivating force behind our work.

* Repoliticizing sexual and reproductive health and rights: report of a global meeting, Langkawi, Malaysia, 3–6 August 2010. At: <www.rhmjournal.org.uk/events/meeting-reports.php>. A print copy can be ordered free from: <[email protected]>.

† Here, when talking about “civil society” and “NGOs”, I mean progressive, pro-SRHR groups. Given the increasing participation in this field of anti-choice and anti-rights NGOs, whose aim is to destroy the gains made in relation to sexual and reproductive health and rights, and of NGOs whose ethos is business- and market-oriented, neither of whom have social justice goals, it becomes important to qualify who is meant.

* This deserves serious, in-depth analysis at country as well as global level.

* The current UK government claims the country is heavily in debt and as a result is dismantling the public sector, slashing every existing social welfare programme, and privatising the National Health Service because, they claim, there is no money to fund them.

† GAVI funding meeting exceeds expectations. Lancet 2011;377:2165–66.

** Price J. The “politically 10%” group. Langkawi report, Annex 2. (See fn ^* page 5 for reference)

†† This, I believe, is due to poorly thought-out changes in donor priorities, in which funding is being shifted to NGOs dominated almost entirely from the USA and UK, which are organising unrepresentative mega-conferences or providing private reproductive health services, separate from public health systems, e.g. through social franchises, primarily contraception and in some cases antenatal and delivery care and abortion. These services, as TK Sundari Ravindran and Sharon Fonn show, are forced to charge user fees that often make them unaffordable for low-income women and may not be sustainable financially in the long run.