Global Population Policy by Paige Whaley Eager

Author:Paige Whaley Eager [Eager, Paige Whaley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Public Policy, General, Social Science, Abortion & Birth Control
ISBN: 9781351933292
Google: 3TcrDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2017-07-05T04:32:58+00:00

Forging an Alliance with the Human Rights Community

“Agents can and do engage in reasoned behavior when they select among a host of possible frames they think will best convey the message of their movement and subsequently resonate with existing frames or meta norms” (Goodwin and Japser 1999). The global women’s health and rights movement, as an actor with agency, used the human rights discourse to frame reproductive autonomy as an inalienable and indispensable right necessary for women to live a dignified life. If we take as a starting point that “reproductive rights” was indeed a Western, feminist principle, we can best understand how it became globalized by framing33 it as an international human rights norm while utilizing the UN conference system as an opening in the international opportunity structure to legitimize this norm. Population control, as conceived by the United States and the population control establishment, was framed by the global women’s health and rights movement as in need of corrective action. The abuses of women’s human rights in coercive population control programs were deemed unjust and intolerable. The emerging norm of reproductive rights and health mobilized the vast majority of the global women’s health and rights movement as an alternative norm to population control. The GWHRM believed that the acceptance of reproductive rights and health by the United Nations, donor agencies, foundations, and states would help ensure a more just, tolerable, and human-rights oriented world for women. The framing of reproductive rights as an internationally recognized human right also gave women working within their domestic social movements a language to lodge oppositional claims against their governments, public agencies, and even other individuals who prevented women from exercising their reproductive autonomy.

As Dr. Anrudh Jain stated, “reproductive rights emerged as a human rights issue and supplanted population control because there was an international network of like-minded individuals across countries influencing each other. It was not simply Adrienne Germain34 working in isolation in the United States trying to get reproductive rights on the agenda.” Thus, to argue that American feminists only influenced women in developing countries in a one-way causal relationship is inaccurate. Lori Ashford of the Population Reference Bureau observed,

Those women who are part of these movements in the developing countries are not the ordinary women on the street. They are highly educated; they are the intelligentsia. They may be doctors or OB/GYNs trained in Africa, yet because they have seen the state of women’s condition in Africa for years, they become mobilized on their own, not due to prodding from the North.35

One important ally of the reproductive rights and health movement was the human rights community. “The international women’s movement drew upon human rights principles to remove women’s reproduction from its isolation, placing it in the larger context of equitable development policies to provide for basic social and material needs, including freedom from abuse, comprehensive health services, education, and employment” (Correa and Reichmann 1994: 92). Moreover, organizations like DAWN urged global Southern women to recognize that claims of cultural relativism

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