The November 2014 RHM journal was my last as RHM’s editor, and I’ve stayed on this year to support Shirin Heidari as the new editor during a transition period. My best wishes go with her!
It’s hard to believe that it’s been 23years since Sundari and I went to see José Barzelatto at the Ford Foundation and convinced him to give us funding to publish two journal issues, with the promise of more if the quality was good enough. The two themes we addressed in 1993 – population and development policy, and abortion law and policy, are – serendipitously – pretty much the same ones I ended my sojourn with in 2014. But what a difference those 23years have made in what we know and in what has been accomplished! It’s been an incredible experience, bringing together under one journal cover the wisdom and experience of policymakers, researchers, service providers and above all advocates for sexual and reproductive health and rights from across the globe, who have put the issues onto national, regional and international agendas, promoting gender equity and equality, and the right to life and health and non-discrimination, in order to make change happen and improve people’s lives.
RHM has never been just a journal or a place to park one’s research findings, either for me or for those publishing in and involved with it. The aim was always to bring people together to use knowledge as a power for good. I’m proud that literally thousands of people have come together in these pages to share and add value to each others’ work and offer so much information to each other about all the ways of improving sexual and reproductive health and people’s lives. I hope the RHM community will go on serving that purpose for many years to come.
There have been many landmarks along the way. We were among the first journals, if not the first, to insist that articles about developing countries should be written by or include authors from those countries, far earlier and far more than other, more prestigious journals did (or still do). Our editorial advisory board was global in representation from the start. As a result, we received articles from all over the world, never forgetting that the problems in the so-called middle- and high-income countries are often equally serious and equally difficult to resolve. Unsafe abortion and gender-based violence are only two examples.
We were among the first to publish abstracts in more than one language and certainly still among the few to publish so many full articles in translation as well as English, let alone in seven languages. Before anyone had heard of open access, we raised funds to ensure that our readers across the global South could receive the journal free and we kept print subscription prices low too. We also began using open peer review from early on, in which both authors and reviewers know each others’ names, long before many others did, in the belief that it would lead to more constructive reviews which would help authors improve their papers – and this proved to be true, with the help of positive peer review guidelines. We also made a commitment early on to give detailed editorial support to authors who needed it, and this form of mentoring has meant that many young and new authors are being published in RHM’s pages, as well as those whose writing and whose English language skills (as opposed to their findings and ideas) need a boost.
We were certainly not the first journal to organise workshops and meetings. Social Science & Medicine was my role model for that, and the extent to which its founder editor Peter McEwan managed to create several regional networks of social scientists in his day has never been bested by anyone. Papers from our workshops and meetings went into the journal or supplements, and were among the most important we published. But the most important meetings for me personally were the annual RHM editorial advisory board meetings, where we chewed over the big issues and made sure they were the focus of the papers we called for. This was a much-needed space for thinking and debate for all of us.
RHM as a community of like-minded people can, I think, take some credit for putting the concepts of comprehensive and integrated sexual and reproductive health and rights on the global agenda. Our focus on qualitative research, women-centred perspectives and personal histories and experiences, often those of young people, and on papers whose ethos was “the personal is political”, meant that we broadened the focus on these issues from the 20th century medico-clinical one to a multidisciplinary one. In the days when USAID restricted US-funded journals from publishing about many aspects of abortion, RHM’s independence allowed us to become a central source of articles on abortion rights as well as unsafe abortion, which has remained the case to this day. We were also among the first to publish on the links between SRHR and HIV, and our articles on the intersection of these issues are widely read by people working in and interested in HIV.
Finding good photographs, especially for the journal cover, and working on design and layout with our production manager was always a pleasure. Unlike most academic journals, I tried to make RHM a visual experience too, given my love of photography. One of the biggest compliments I recall receiving was when a colleague said her husband didn’t read the journal, it wasn’t his field of interest, but he always looked at the pictures. At a time when women-centred perspectives barely existed in this field, it seemed crucial to me for journal readers to see who the women were that they were reading about. It still does. And from almost total dependence on photo agencies for pictures in our first 10–15 years, when photo agencies gave more attention to women being in the world than they appear to do now, more and more authors themselves began taking photos that came with their papers.
The decisions to include papers about visual media, which in a way takes photographs a major step further, and to plunge RHM into the blog and social media worlds, were important ones.
I continue to be amazed and thrilled that the web has made it possible for the papers in RHM to be downloaded each year more than a quarter of a million times. Contrast that with our first few years, when the 40-odd editorial advisory board members were tasked with recruiting ten subscribers each, and when they did, we thought that was a lot!
Abandoning the print journal feels like a terrible loss, and marks the end of an era. I rue the loss of books and print journals. I hope they don’t disappear – and I’m far from alone in this. I don’t want to spend every minute of my life looking at a computer screen. It worries me to think of people having to depend entirely on the web, let alone coping with an ever-changing technology that they don’t know how to control or fix, in order to be able to read and learn and share knowledge. Print is my medium of choice, it’s solid, no one can turn it off, and as long as there are books, I’ll stick with them.
I hope younger generations will ensure that online-only knowledge-sharing succeeds and does not exclude whole swathes of people, that open access as defined in today’s journal universe (authors having to pay a lot to get published) does not exclude young authors, or those from the global South and those outside well-funded academia. I fear it will. I hope information will not become inaccessible as the technology to store and share it changes drastically every few years and makes former storage formats unusable. Are publishers ensuring that online publication serves as well as print has done in its time to reach everyone who needs it and wants to get their hands on it? The importance of information and evidence on how to make change happen – safely, inclusively, equitably, comprehensively and effectively – cannot be overstated.
On the basis of the kind of knowledge RHM has carried, the SRHR community, and especially the younger generation, have gone into government, health care, NGOs, education, and human rights work, promoting and implementing public health and human rights principles, becoming researchers and health professionals, studying the law and working to reform it, becoming politicians who transform politics, training as public health systems managers and working to strengthen public health systems, developing equitable and just policies, and engaging above all in the application of human rights at all levels.
In 1993, we launched the journal in order to explore women-centred perspectives and assert that reproductive health and rights matter. Arising from HIV activism, happening at the same time, the fight for sexual rights was engaged, and we realised that without autonomy in both our sexual and reproductive lives, our right to health would remain limited. Today, RHM and the SRHR community it has helped to build are in the forefront of support for aspirational and achievable sustainable development goals in relation to health and human rights, and some of us are calling for a framework convention on health that can be used to hold governments accountable for making the right to health a reality.
There is so much yet to fight for, especially with many experts in both maternal health and family planning going backwards by failing to support the need for comprehensive SRHR and especially the need for safe abortion to reduce maternal deaths from unsafe abortions and as a crucial means of fertility control. The corporate, private sector is doing its damnedest to swallow up public health systems (and changing development funding irrevocably) and that must be stopped somehow, both in countries where health systems are weak and those where they are (or were) strong. Many aspects of sexual and reproductive health and rights have fallen off the agenda, or never managed to get up there in the first place. In some quarters, SRHR is seen, I fear, as having had its day in the sun. Other issues, in and outside health, are crowding onto the stage and while they also deserve attention – it should not be at the expense of sexual and reproductive health and rights.
As regards the creation and sharing of knowledge in the field, there have been huge changes in the years since the journal began. There is a lot of competition today, although few other journals have a political mission that is reflected in the papers they publish, as RHM has. So, on many fronts the fight has really only just begun. The bottom line, that issues of most import to women always get dismissed as controversial and shoved aside, hasn’t changed a jot in many ways.
Leaving has been very hard indeed. But I am proud to have been RHM’s founder and editor – with (more than) a little help from my friends! Moreover, there’s no need to say goodbye, as I’m not disappearing. Far from it; I’ve never felt more like engaging with the issues, and I’ll be doing so as an advocate, writer, editor and lecturer. In these last few months, I've returned full-time to my roots as an abortion rights advocate to be the Coordinator of the International Campaign for Women’s Right to Safe Abortion, which I helped to found in May 2012 and have been the listserve editor of since it was launched. The Berer Blog has followed me (https://bererblog.wordpress.com/), and I have started writing it more regularly again too. So farewell, but I hope not goodbye!
Heartfelt thanks
Thanks first and foremost to TK Sundari Ravindran and Ros Petchesky, to RHM staff Pathika Martin, Lisa Hallgarten, Paula Hajnal-Konyi and Sîan Long, Rosa Tunberg and others before them, and especially to designer/production manager Carol Brickley, who have been right there alongside me in fair weather and foul. Many thanks also to all RHM in translation editors and editorial teams, and especially to the hundreds of authors and peer reviewers who have contributed to these pages, to Françoise DeLuca-Lacoste and Lisette Silva, wonderful translators, and to the dozens of supportive editorial advisory board members and trustees over the years, especially for our inspiring meetings – remembering especially Erica Royston. Last but not least to Greyling Peoples at Elsevier, SPI typesetters and James at Witherby’s, our printers. Heartfelt thanks for your commitment, hard work and thought-provoking contributions to the journal. It has been an honour and a pleasure to work with all of you. RHM could never have become what it is without each and every one of you.
Farewell, Marge, but not goodbye for a long time yet!
