editorials

Repoliticising sexual and reproductive health and rights

Marge Berer, RHM 38

In 2008, a small discussion meeting organised by RHM, mostly involving RHM board members, explored what was happening globally in the work being done towards achieving sexual and reproductive health and rights. We began with the fact that although conferences are an essential forum for communication in our field and have played an important role in public health efforts to galvanise support, share critical information and determine policy direction, in recent years the culture of reproductive and sexual health conferences, as with the international AIDS conferences, has evolved in line with corporatized global trends, with star-studded casts and millions of dollars and tens of thousands of person-hours spent on them. We questioned whether such conferences were making a valuable contribution to our work. From there we moved on to examine the consequences of what we perceived to be the fragmentation of work in our field and the depoliticisation of the process and the goals involved as the number of issues taken up and groups and networks involved has burgeoned, and as some of the issues have become mainstreamed. The issues we raised included:

• the narrowing down and simplification of the goals developed in the 1990s in several UN meetings, where the participation of sexual and reproductive health and rights advocates was influential;
• the consequences of huge amounts of money being given to specific aspects of the disease burden and next to nothing to others;
• the potential and limitations of using human rights to promote sexual and reproductive rights;
• the privatisation of health systems as part of neo-liberal economic pressures to dismantle states' responsibility for social welfare;
• the denigration of the value of public health systems and consequently their being starved of resources;
• short-term targets for achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) instead of long-term goals and plans;
• a failure to support, beyond lip service, developing country ownership of their own health goals;
• an obsession on the part of many donors with measuring and counting, even in the absence of the resources needed to make change happen; and
• the absence of collectively agreed accountability mechanisms that all the key players in the health field, including donors, governments and civil society, adhere to.

As researchers, advocates and activists, academics, health professionals, and staff of non-governmental, governmental and inter-governmental organisations and agencies, we also acknowledged the failure of our movement to work together internationally for a common agenda that crosses reproductive health, reproductive rights, sexual health and sexual rights - as these affect everyone, not only women.

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