Sexual and reproductive health rights and justice – tracking the relationship

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Acknowledgements

The majority of the contributions to this symposium issue were initially presented at a conference entitled Global Flows, Human Rights, Sexual and Reproductive Health: Ethnographies of Institutional Change in the South, organised by the first author at the University of Sussex, UK, in July 2011 (supported by an ESRC grant Res-062-23-1609 and a small grant from the Wellcome Trust). A subsequent panel discussion on Global Flows, Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights: Ethnographies of Crossing and ‘Translation’ in the Global South was organised by both the authors at the American Anthropological Association meeting in San Francisco in November 2012. We thank Lynn Morgan for sharing her notes as discussant for the panel.

Notes

^1. In their work on reproductive justice, Luna and Luker (2013) highlight the dynamic yet tenuous relation between the law, social movements and academic scholarship. They suggest that while reproductive rights stem from a law-focused social movement, reproductive justice is predicated on notions of social justice, which emphasise intersectional social identities and community development solutions to structural inequalities.

^2. For Bailey (2011, 728), it is this ability to mobilise individuals and communities to create structural change through which notions of justice emerge as moral indicators. However, as she elaborates, the notion of reproductive justice cannot account for an independent moral theory until it accounts for why reproductive oppression is morally wrong or how reproductive goods and services ought to be fairly distributed.

^3. See UNFPA reports such as State of the World's population, the WHO monograph on evaluating the impact of rights (Bustreo et al. 2013) and the proposed bill on Universal Health coverage in India, for example.