Women's Health in a Free Market Economy
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- from María Hamlin Zúniga <maria@iphcglobal.org>
"A Decade After Cairo: Women's Health in a Free Market Economy"
by Sumati Nair and Preeti Kirbat with Sarah Sexton
Corner House Briefing no 31 - June 2004
http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk
It is now ten years since the UN held its International Confer-
ence on Population and Development in Cairo. Its Programme of
Action was the first and most comprehensive international policy
document to promote the concepts of reproductive rights and re-
productive health.
Its major recommendation -- that population programmes should
provide integrated reproductive health services rather than just
family planning -- reflects the organising and lobbying of
women's groups.
One decade later, however, some 600,000 women die each year (95
per cent of them in sub Saharan Africa and Asia) while 18 mil-
lion are left disabled or chronically ill because of largely
preventable complications during pregnancy or childbirth. These
figures indicate that many women do not have access to essential
and emergency obstetric care, let alone access to more compre-
hensive reproductive health services.
Indeed, health services in many countries are in terminal de-
cline. The underlying conditions that determine women's health
and their ability to make decisions about their childbearing are
deteriorating. Fundamentalisms opposing women's rights are on
the rise. And Malthusian thinking is as ingrained as ever in
many development institutions, donor agencies and government de-
partments.
These four trends can be attributed in large measure to the im-
plementation of neo-liberal economic policies over the past two
decades, first by means of structural adjustment programmes and
more recently by international trade agreements. Such policies
have helped to prevent the more progressive aspects of the Cairo
Programme of Action from being implemented.
More critically, however, the Programme of Action, and the po-
litical organising that accompanied it, did not challenge this
neo-liberal framework sufficiently. In fact, it endorsed it in
several respects.
A closer look at the ways in which neo-liberalism has impacted
upon women's reproductive rights may suggest avenues for more
fruitful alliances with other social movements in the future.
Corner House Briefing 31, "A Decade After Cairo: Women's Health
in a Free Market Economy" is now on the Corner House website,
http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk, in html and PDF formats.
[Adobe PDF file 36 pp. 203 kB]:
http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/pdf/briefing/31cairo.pdf
Please contact us mailto:enquiries@thecornerhouse.org.uk if you
would like a printed paper copy or to receive an electronic copy
directly rather than via the website.
Best regards
Sarah Sexton/Larry Lohmann/Nicholas Hildyard
The Corner House
http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk