Sound and Fury ‒ engaging with the politics and the law of sexual rights

Abstract

Although past resistance to sexual rights in global debates has often been grounded in claims to culture, nation and religion, opposition voices are now using, rather than rejecting, the frame of international human rights. This Commentary argues that, despite opponents’ attempts to defeat sexual rights with other rights claims, a careful understanding of the principles of international human rights and its legal development exposes how the use of rights to oppose sexual rights should, and will ultimately, fail. The Commentary briefly takes up three kinds of “rights” claims made by opponents of sexual rights: limiting rights to protect rights, textual basis, and universality, and explores the rationales and impact of their application to countering sexual rights. Because sexuality and reproduction intersect as well as diverge in the opposition they face, this struggle matters intensely and plays out across advocacy, programmatic and policy worlds. Underpinning this Commentary is the understanding that opposition to sexual and reproductive health rights uses common arguments about rights principles that must be understood in order to be countered.

Résumé

Bien que la résistance passée aux droits sexuels dans les débats internationaux se soit souvent appuyée sur des revendications à la culture, la nation et la religion, les voix de l’opposition se servent maintenant du cadre des droits de l’homme internationaux, plutôt que de le rejeter. Ce commentaire avance qu’en dépit des tentatives des opposants pour venir à bout des droits sexuels avec d’autres revendications de droits, une soigneuse compréhension des principes des droits de l’homme internationaux et son développement juridique montrent comment l’utilisation des droits pour s’opposer aux droits sexuels devrait échouer, et échouera en fin de compte. Le commentaire se penche brièvement sur trois types de revendications de « droits » présentées par les opposants aux droits sexuels : la limitation des droits à protéger les droits, la base textuelle et l’universalité. Il explore les raisons d’être et l’impact de leur application pour contrer les droits sexuels. Puisque la sexualité et la procréation se rejoignent et divergent à la fois dans l’opposition qu’elles rencontrent, cette lutte est intensément importante et joue un rôle dans le plaidoyer, les mondes programmatiques et politiques. Ce Commentaire repose sur la notion selon laquelle l’opposition aux droits à la santé sexuelle et génésique utilise des arguments communs sur les principes de droits qui doivent être compris pour être vaincus.

Resumen

Aunque en el pasado la resistencia a los derechos sexuales en debates mundiales a menudo se basaba en afirmaciones relacionadas con la cultura, nación y religión, las voces de oposición ahora están utilizando, y no rechazando, el marco de derechos humanos internacionales. Este Comentario argumenta que, pese a los intentos de los oponentes por derrotar los derechos sexuales con otras afirmaciones de derechos, un cuidadoso entendimiento de los principios de los derechos humanos internacionales y su desarrollo jurídico expone cómo el uso de los derechos para oponerse a los derechos sexuales debería fallar y a la larga fallará. El Comentario examina de manera resumida tres tipos de afirmaciones de "derechos" hechas por oponentes de los derechos sexuales: limitar los derechos para proteger los derechos, base textual y universalidad, y explora las justificativas y el impacto de su aplicación para contrarrestar los derechos sexuales. Dado que la sexualidad y reproducción coinciden y divergen en la oposición que enfrentan, esta lucha es de suma importancia y atañe a los campos de promoción y defensa, programas y políticas. Este Comentario se basa en el entendimiento de que la oposición a los derechos de salud sexual y reproductiva utiliza argumentos comunes acerca de los principios de derechos que deben ser entendidos para poder ser contrarrestados.

Key words:

• sexual rights
• methods and politics of legal development
• universality
• rights in conflict
• legitimizing sexual rights

Introduction

Those who use international human rights to support programmes and policy that further the enjoyment of sexual health and rights are finding themselves facing new challenges. While using human rights to support work on sexuality and sexual health has often been attacked as an affront to morality or culture, what is new and worth marking is the way attacks on sexual rights have changed. While some attacks on sexual rights continue to mobilize claims of “tradition”, “morality”, “religion” or “culture” to resist legal obligations,* opposition to sexual rights now combines these arguments with the language of rights. As we explore below, this means the attacks no longer reject human rights but rather use the language and principles of rights, including attention to treaty interpretation, universalism, and the need to limit some rights to protect other rights. This Commentary aims to analyse the new style and content of recent attacks on sexual rights and to sketch out the rights bases to refute these attacks. Advocates for sexual rights can combat the challenges to those rights claims using the rules of human rights, but must acknowledge that in doing so we are participating in the ongoing process of contesting rights related to sexuality. In support of this effort, accompanying this Commentary, and included in this volume, is a guide to the body of rules and principles that govern the development of human rights generally, and to the application of human rights to sexuality and sexual health in particular.

Resistance to sexual rights

The directions and forms of resistance to sexual rights are multiple. The resistance is broad in scope, linked to the fact that the content of sexual rights is expansive and intersects closely with reproductive rights. The constant marking of both “sexual rights” and “sexual and reproductive health and rights” as points of contestation prods us to enunciate the scope of “sexual rights” as linked to, but also distinct from, reproductive rights. We have resisted arbitrary line-drawing between and among these sets of rights for doctrinal, normative, contextual and political reasons. This resistance might strike some as ironic, given that one of the authors (Miller) produced a manifesto on the need to identify which rights were “sexual but not reproductive” almost a decade ago. But Miller’s point in calling attention to those sexual rights which were not reproductive was not to hive sexuality off from reproduction into a separate sphere of rights, but rather to make the point that sexuality and its diverse forms and meanings needed specific attention, including in its linkage to reproduction. At the turn of the millennium, this was not happening on a regular basis: many conversations about sexuality subsumed it under reproduction, while other conversations treated sexual rights as if they were only related to same-sex conduct, and in this mode never linked to reproduction.¹ We understand sexual rights to include the right to be free from discrimination based on sexual practice or orientation, but also to embrace how human rights have been applied to people’s access to contraception and abortion, and to determining when and if sexual conduct leads to reproduction.

We broadly hold that sexual rights are rights that allow people to determine how their sexuality matters, and to act on that determination. For example, rights relating to abortion are rights within the ambit of sexual rights insofar as they are part of a constellation of services, which include contraceptive services, and which allows heterosexual sexual conduct to be separated from reproduction. There are some reproductive rights, for example rights related to healthy maternity and childbirth, that are less connected to sexuality, and these are not included in sexual rights as discussed in this Commentary. There are, of course, sexuality-related aspects of maternal health which would be included, as when lesbian-identified women face discrimination or exclusion in access to reproductive health services such as artificial reproductive technology or services related to maternal health, because of living outside acceptable (married) norms. By the same token, there are the non-biological aspects of reproduction, such as adoption, that are clearly linked to rights related to gender, sexual orientation, and gender expression. These examples remind us that rights relating to sexuality and reproduction are closely linked and that rigidity in assigning rights to one category or another is not productive.

In the past, and still today in many contexts, attacks on sexual rights – regardless of how they are formally categorized – were and often are couched in the language of morality or culture. In this mode the language of human rights is pronounced irrelevant or outright denounced as an injection of a new and destructive approach to gender relationships, especially to the cultures and traditions claimed by various societies. In the face of such attacks, sexual health and rights advocates have focused their claims on how rights worked, that is, they demonstrate how human rights, such as the right to be free from torture and inhumane and degrading treatment, can and must be applied to ensure protections against sexual violence.² Bringing health and rights arguments together in this way relied on the application of accepted principles of human rights to new facts, such as applying the right to information and non-discrimination to guarantee the material and cultural conditions needed for individuals to express their sexual and gender identity or determine their reproductive lives. While not yet fully realized, the innovative application of rights arguments to sexual and reproductive health were accepted within the international system as part of the evolving work of human rights.³ At the time, however, opponents of sexual rights did not use human rights arguments to contest these developments. Sexual rights were denounced by reference to harm to local, diverse cultures, or by recourse to various scriptural positions justifying the denial of sexual decision-making, as demonstrated in the Holy See’s reservations to the adoption of the final Platform for Action of the Fourth World Conference for Women.⁴

Today, however, actors that used to rely only on religious texts or claims to custom or morality are now also using the language and methods of human rights to counter the application of rights to sexuality. Though their “human rights” claims are often simultaneously grounded in moral and religious arguments, and a specious mixing of misstatements with affirmations of core international human rights principles, this new posture by opponents of sexual rights poses specific challenges for sexual and reproductive rights advocates.⁵

In many ways the fight over whether “sexual rights are human rights” has been a diversionary tactic: no one doubts that there are “fair trial rights” just because the words “fair trial rights” do not appear as the unique text of an article in either the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) or some other treaty explicitly proclaiming them.⁶ Everyone agrees that such rights are constructed from the protections offered by bringing together a number of different and related rights. The term “sexual rights” likewise is a convenient shorthand to encompass the many existing rights that can be found across a wide range of treaties, and which have been applied by authoritative international, regional and national human rights bodies to ensure protections related to sexuality as an aspect of the human person and sexual health. The range of rights that has been so applied includes the rights to the highest attainable standard of health, security of the person, information and expression, freedom from torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, as well as rights of association, life, privacy and non-discrimination.^7–12

The key concept, however – sexuality as a rights-worthy aspect of the person – is precisely what opponents of the term “sexual rights” are seeking to forestall. Many opponents of sexual rights understand the threat to naturalized notions of sexuality posed by attaching the full range of human rights to sexuality. If rights in practice are about ensuring meaningful abilities of diverse people to make decisions about their own bodies and lives (“self-propriety” as Petchesky once wrote)¹³ – including decisions about whether sexual acts lead to reproduction or with whom to have sexual intimacy, as well as about ensuring the institutional and material conditions for such “self-propriety” in public and private settings – then no single mode of sexuality can be prescribed. Moreover, with a concept of sexual decision-making, sexuality cannot be held to spring directly from the body (of a binary hetero-normative construct of being “man” or “woman”), which a deity or nature intended for only one thing – procreation. It is important to note that the version of sexual rights these opponents seek to halt is not only about sexual decision-making as some artifice of liberal rights. Sexuality and its related human rights are subject to public and private debate as well as to changeable meanings, challenges of existing regulations and to engaging with broader legal and social protections. In this context, it is also central to political calls for greater fairness in access to resources as well as for equality for all persons, as part of a movement for global justice.

Obfuscation of terms

This tightrope of argumentation over sexual rights has recently been made clear in the notably ambiguous way in which the US government has embraced sexual rights. In a policy statement made to the UN Women Executive Board in September 2015, the US stated that it would begin using the term “sexual rights” (along with the phrase “sexual and reproductive health and rights”) in human rights and development discussions. This statement was heralded by some advocates as a step forward.¹⁴ In its explanation, drawing explicitly on paragraph 96 from the Platform for Action adopted at the 1995 Beijing Womens Conference, the US’s statement held that its understanding of sexual rights included “all individuals’ rights to have control over and decide freely and responsibly on matters related to their sexuality…”. However, in putting forward this understanding, the US rather oddly also appeared to claw back the reach of this declaration by stating that the terms sexual rights or sexual and reproductive health and rights “express rights which are not legally binding. Sexual rights are not human rights and they are not enshrined in international human rights law…”.¹⁵

This statement, therefore, while perhaps useful in demonstrating that sexual rights can be used as a comprehensive policy phrase in global settings, is a kind of “one step forward, two steps to the side” move: if the US had simply declared that sexual rights encompass a constellation of rights, of which some have reached binding status and others are still evolving in soft law, but all of which are part of the vision of human rights, the statement would have allowed politics and human rights law to co-exist.

It is worth pausing here to quickly note why a strong state might simultaneously use and claw back a sexual rights statement. The dynamics are local and global and rooted in both law and politics, all features of the general struggle over sexual rights. The US government’s opposition to recognizing sexual rights as “binding” stems, in our opinion from sexual rights being caught between the blades of a parochial US scissor: each blade has distinct historical roots, on the one hand the stubborn legacy of US Constitutional and Cold War-inflected limitations on rights, such that only legal and political rights were legally binding and the health and other social rights pertinent to sexual and reproductive health were “aspirational”; and on the other hand, from a still powerful deference to the domestic anti-abortion legislators in Congress, who control the purse strings and policy levers of US reproductive health policy abroad. From this dual slicing comes a policy statement almost unintelligible as law, even while perhaps of use in positioning the US as supportive of decades of advocacy to validate the use of human rights in sexuality and sexual and reproductive health work.

The turn to human rights law by opponents of sexual rights

We highlight here three of the various styles of attack by opponents of sexual rights: (a) textuality – the claim that only what is explicitly written in treaties can be claimed as a right; (b) countervailing rights claims; and (c) the effort to revise the way “universal” is understood as an aspect of human rights. Other writers have stressed other arguments made by religious groups to limit sexual rights (such as positioning sexuality only within marriage and the family, for example).⁶

In examining how calls to rights are used to limit sexual rights, we emphasize the way forward is not to claim that human rights are monolithic and unchanging. Rather, we emphasize two core ideas. First, human rights law, as all law, is designed to be an evolving practice. There are few, if any, places where international human rights law is not subject to interpretation. Disputing the application and meaning of rights is part of the democratic process of giving rights global meaning. Second, this contestation is not a free-for-all: there are rules and principles that guide the messy scrum of human rights interpretation. It is our contention that we can acknowledge contestation even as we call some players “out of order”. The arguments against sexual diversity or access to contraception and abortion, for example, can be countered by pointing out which principles of human rights (such as non-discrimination, or the evolving rights of the child) the opponents of sexual rights are ignoring.

“Textuality”

Opponents of sexual rights assert that explicit text (“textuality”) is the sole determinant of the validity of rights. The 2011 San Jose Articles authored by a high-level group of anti-choice conservatives purport to authoritatively “restate” the content of international law vis-à-vis abortion.¹⁶ The authors assert that there is no “right to abortion” because nowhere are the specific words “right to abortion” found in an international treaty, and the authors claim that treaty bodies have no power to interpret treaties to create new obligations. This is a clear example of the move to halt the evolution of sexual rights and is remarkable for its inaccuracy as concerns the actual practice of treaty law. This claim to the “text” as the sole determinant is disproved by the existence of an entire treaty-based branch of international law conditioned on interpretation – the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.¹⁷ Moreover, human rights treaty provisions in general are formulated broadly to provide core concepts. How the right is enjoyed is always the product of application and evolving detail. No one would question, for example, that the right to privacy also applies to use of Internet data and cyber surveillance. The terms of the rights in the 1966 draft of the ICCPR mention nothing about the Internet, and yet the Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression and Information has recently issued a report with regard to the interrelation of information and privacy to the Internet. While some of the content of his proposed norms was contested, no state refused the idea that privacy and information rights have relevance to the digital world.¹⁸

Despite this clear general practice of evolution in the application of human rights, the San Jose Articles freight their arguments in strong claims about the text of treaties and especially rely on claims about the power of states versus those of treaty bodies. Unfortunately for their “authoritativeness” they omit or ignore the last twenty-five years of jurisprudence, scholarly writing and state practice that has acknowledged the authority of UN treaty bodies to give guidance on the meaning of articles in relevant treaties, as well as the explicit power of some treaty bodies, such as the European or the Inter-American Courts of Human Rights, to guide the development of rights law as changing times warrant.¹⁹ The example of the San Jose Articles is telling: its trajectory has been much diminished by the clear refutations of its position in the regional and international declarations and documents adopted in the ICPD + 20 process, in particular the Montevideo Statement.²⁰

So, while it is true that the words “sexual rights” or the specific guarantee for access to abortion, or to non-discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation are not written anywhere in the text of any United Nations’ treaty, the absence of explicit language does not end the story: as we note here and elsewhere (the Guide) sexual rights, including those relating to abortion, are being established according to the prescribed rules of human rights.

In general, the rules of development for international human rights are governed by the rules of all international law. Notably, however, there is increasing expert support in international law for the idea that because human rights law affects the rights and lives of people under the control of states, there are key differences in how the content of human rights law can evolve as distinct from general international law: this difference is in favor of increased protections for human rights.

Moreover, for those who assert that the state remains the final arbiter of treaty evolution, there is sufficient compliance in state practice following these international norms to make it clear that these “extra-textual” interpretations by the treaty committees are being granted the force of law. Importantly, for those who work closely with states, we note that many states are referencing not solely treaty obligations as their reason for changing national laws, but also referencing international expert agreements and politically negotiated standards, which means they feel that there is sufficient authority in these standards for doing so. The recent decision of the Indian Constitutional Court on accepting a “third gender”, referencing a mixture of international treaty and expert statements, is a noteworthy example.²¹

In regard to protection from discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, there is now, in fact, a negotiated treaty – the 2013 Inter-American treaty on discrimination and intolerance – which includes the words “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” in its text, in addition to various national constitutions and laws that already include protections on these grounds.²² It is clear that the evolution of legal doctrine in relation to sexuality is indisputable and the argument of textuality is not sufficient as a matter of international doctrine.

Countervailing rights claims

Another effort by opponents of sexual rights can be seen in their efforts to assert countervailing rights claims, such as those to “fetal personhood” in the context of the right to life, or religious rights in the context of the right to expression and freedom of thought. This move may take on different forms. For example, there are currently some national laws and constitutional court decisions that assert the right to religious expression of persons and the religious conscience of those who deny equal treatment of gay couples in public services, or deny services to girls and women who seek to control and limit their fertility.²³

It is true that some rights, such as freedom from torture or slavery, for example, are absolute, and that other rights, such as privacy, expression and association, can in certain circumstances be restricted. However, the rules by which rights can be limited are strictly defined by standards that assert that the measures must be in accordance with the law, proportionate, effective and necessary in a democratic society, and that they must be non-discriminatory.^{24 †} Some rights, such as the right to hold ideas or beliefs, are unfettered while the actions that a person or a government can take in service of these ideas are much more limited. A person can hold a belief about the immorality of a person, but cannot not hire, fire, deny housing or educational opportunities to them because of these beliefs.²⁵ As an example, the arguments in favour of protections for consciously held beliefs (“conscience clause”) – that it is discriminatory to limit some religious “expression” – fails under a full examination of international human rights law as rights can only be expressed up to the point where that expression does not harm the rights of others. Thus, manifestations of religion can be limited but only as necessary to protect the rights of others.²⁶

A religious person’s freedom of expression of their conscience can be limited when it would interfere with the exercise of another person’s rights (e.g., to control her fertility or to exercise the right to marry). “Conscience clause” based arguments have been used by medical or administrative personnel to withhold the provision of abortion services or same-sex marriage applications. Under the rules of human rights law, in the case of abortion, no individual provider can be forced to provide a non-emergency service directly counter to their religious beliefs. However, in case of a medical emergency, where referral is not available or appropriate, a conscience clause argument cannot prevail over a woman’s right to a legal abortion. Similarly, if the right to marry (or not to marry) is understood as a fundamental right, the differential treatment of either same-sex couples or unmarried persons by state employees citing religious conviction has to be confined in their actual practice of the law. The application of this principle is found in a recent ECHR case, which on the one hand recognised the rights of a person to hold a belief condemning same-sex marriage but on the other hand disallowed the refusal by that person to issue marriage licenses on the basis of that belief.²⁷

Another set of “countervailing rights claims” has recently erupted within countries under the guise of national governments asserting that they are protecting children’s rights. These laws fail to recognize age difference and are premised on the notion that all persons under 18 are the same kind of “child” that must be kept innocent of sexual ideas. For example, the idea that persons under 18 are harmed by hearing about “homosexuality” or diverse family forms is one of the incentives underlying a new spate of national laws prohibiting speech on gay rights in the name of “children’s” rights.²⁸ However, this call fails on at least two grounds. Firstly, children themselves have a right to seek, receive and impart information about sexuality, sexual health and different identities and practices in accordance with their evolving capacity, as the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) has stated with attention to its interpretive principles of non-discrimination and the best interest of the child.^29–31 Secondly, speech, such as that on sexual identity and gender expression diversity, can only be limited if there is demonstration of actual harm to others, including threats to national security or public health.^10,12

“Universality” arguments

States and non-state actors are also using claims to “universality” to block evolving sexual rights claims. An example of this is the statement by Syria at the UN General Assembly in 2008. On behalf of fifty-seven states, seeking to refute the arguments of other governments calling on protections from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, Syria led a statement against “new rights” for a “special set of people”, rights they asserted were not found in any universally accepted document.³² More recently, at the Human Rights Council in 2014, a number of member states (led by Egypt and Russia) sought debate and institutionalization of an agenda item on the “protection of the family and its members”. They sought to focus attention on “the family” as a uniform structure recognized in human rights treaties, and implicitly to defeat rights claims of persons whose rights are harmed by various structures of family. Examples of such harm would be the rights of married women where marital rape or lack of intervention into violence are encoded into the law, or of persons in same-sex couples where same-sex marriage is not allowed.³³

Both the General Assembly debates and the Council debates invoked the language of “universality” to defeat the rights of differently situated persons, or persons whose rights claims (married women and domestic violence) or whose concerns may not have been written into original texts. In the case of the Syrian-led statement, the reference to “a special set of people” sought to position emerging rights as special rights: because LGBTI people, or rights related to sexual orientation, were not imagined in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, any claim of sexual difference being protected by human rights is “carved out” of universal rights (i.e., are special rights). In the case of the Council debate on family, the opponents of sexual rights seek to use a concept – “the family” – which appears in this universal rights document and re-position the family as an actual rights holder. But human rights are not held by “the family” as such. In both examples, the states are relying on historical understandings and made-up rights holders as the authority for their interpretation of “universal rights”, and refuting the evolving interpretations of these rights in order to deny rights claims.

Attempts to deny the evolution of rights also rest on another flawed argument. At its most basic, the idea of the “universality of rights” implies that human rights are rights that should be available to everyone regardless of where they are on the globe: figuring out how to apply fundamental rights to differently situated persons, as An-Na’im remarked over twenty years ago, needs more than the lowest common denominator or agreement on how to do so, nor can only some governments' refusal to affirm the content of rights halt the new content of rights.³⁴ At different moments in rights evolution, states take different postures in relation to these rights. It is in this zone, in which we agree to struggle in geo-politically different settings but according to the rules of legal development, that sexual rights currently rest. Human rights are structured to be flexible enough to support local and regional diversity, while constantly pushing states to explain how their system fits within all persons’ rights to dignity, equality and freedom. It is critical to accept and work with the idea that the system is structured to allow the uneven development of rights.¹⁹ International human rights law is built on the idea that disagreement between and among states can move rights protections forward by forging a new and more humanly protective consensus. In this way, the system recognizes the evolution of rights as tied to the temporal nature of state polities.

International human rights as an open field of contestation

Thus, states, including those claiming theocratic purity, and non-state actors across a range of religious and cultural affiliations, are adding to their original arguments of “religion” and “morality” that there are rights-based reasons to support their claims. In addition to the issues we sketch above, we see other challenges, such as the recent appeal to the Human Rights Committee to interpret the article (6) on the right to life to include “fetal life”.³⁵ In their engagement at national level, with the treaty bodies, and in the political spaces of the UN more generally, opponents of sexual rights are shifting from morality-based arguments and choosing to fight in the arena of law. The proponents of right to “fetal life” are no more automatically shut out of attempts to use rights claims than those of us seeking to use rights claims for decriminalizing access to abortion or rights to information on family planning. The answer to why their claim for “fetal life” or religious exceptions cannot defeat rights claims to access to abortion or sexual diversity lies within rights.

This Commentary is intended to call attention to the shift by opponents of sexual rights toward using the power of human rights to support their arguments. We should note the switch, and ensure that opponents of sexual rights do not pick and choose some legal doctrines and ignore others. The basic principles of human rights do not instantly foreclose rights claims being made, but they do ultimately work together in ways that can defeat the regressive claims. It is this contestation on both sides of rights that we ask advocates for sexual rights to see as part of the process we agree to engage in when we strive to advance human rights.

The human rights systems at the international and regional level recognize that the evolution of rights is tied to the nature of states and their politics. These systems do not endorse a vision of states as bearers of absolute and timeless truths, but rather see inter-state and intra-state struggles over rights as legitimate spaces for working for equality, freedom, diversity and justice with this set of tools. Sexuality, as with every domain of humanity for which we seek rights, is made through politics, but at the same time seeks not to be subjected to politics. Working for sexuality, sexual health and sexual diversity is capable of bringing out the worst kind of politics in rights – or the best.

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Rachel Lipstein for her research and editorial assistance.

Notes

* We use three terms – culture, tradition and morality – to cover a great deal of ground. Historically and regionally different manifestations of almost all religions, whether they stem from Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism or other faiths, have been mobilized by powerful actors in political settings to regulate sexual behavior or reproductive capacity. Over the last twenty-five to thirty years, scholarship in Reproductive Health Matters and elsewhere has detailed a specific intensification and distinct shape of the opposition to the new paradigms of “sexual and reproductive health and rights”, dating back to the “globalized focus” on this developed during the World Conference on Human Rights (1993), the International Conference on Population and Development (1994) and the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing (1995). For a comprehensive analysis of some of the commonalities across opposition to sexual rights as posed by a family of religious claims designated as “fundamentalisms”, see: Freedman, Lynn P. The Challenge of Fundamentalisms. Reproductive Health Matters Volume 4, Issue 8, 55–69.

† We note here that the rules guiding how the speech, association, or information-seeking rights of persons under 18 can be limited in ways distinct from adults, but the Committee on the Rights of the Child has made clear that these limits can be scrutinized and struck down, even in the face of family objection if they counteract core principles of non-discrimination and fail to respect the evolving capacity of the child, including the need to combat gender stereotypes and promote health. See our “Guide” in this volume for more elaboration.