WGNRR’s Written Statement for CSW59

The Women’s Global Network for Reproductive Rights, representing over a thousand organizations and individuals worldwide working to realize the full sexual and reproductive health and rights of all people, welcomes the focus of the Commission of the Status of Women on the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action.

Twenty years ago at the Fourth World Conference on Women, world leaders committed to collectively uphold the rights and empowerment of women and girls. Since then, the resulting Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action has stimulated unprecedented political energy and social mobilization around the world, with governments, civil society and others using it to take steps to end inequality, discrimination and violence against women and girls. While recognizing the substantial progress made since the adoption of the Platform for Action, however, it must be stated that such progress has not been universal and that there is still far to go in realizing the full promise of the Beijing agenda.

In particular we would like to draw the Commission’s attention to the unfulfilled sexual and reproductive health and rights of women and girls, particularly as they relate to the following critical areas of concern outlined in the Platform for Action: unacceptable inequalities and inadequacies in and unequal access to health care and related services; continued violence against women; lack of respect for and inadequate promotion and protection of the human rights of women; and persistent discrimination against and violation of the rights of the girl child.

Human rights violations stemming from women and girls’ unmet sexual and reproductive health and rights are unacceptably common worldwide. For one, access to a range of voluntary, safe, and affordable contraceptive options continues to remain out of reach for roughly 222 million women in developing countries. Even if the global need for safe and voluntary contraception were met, moreover, no existing method of contraception is 100% effective, entailing that there would still be a need for safe, accessible and legal abortion services. Yet unsafe abortion continues to be one of the leading causes of maternal mortality and morbidity, where an estimated 47,000 women needlessly die each year, accounting for approximately 13% of maternal deaths worldwide, and an additional 5 million women are annually hospitalized because of abortion-related complications. Furthermore, the sexual and reproductive health and rights of adolescent girls in particular are ignored in many developing countries. Approximately 16 million girls aged 15 to 19 years and 2 million girls under the age of 15 give birth every year, and complications from pregnancy and childbirth are the leading causes of death among girls in this age range. When trying to access sexual and reproductive health services, moreover, young women and girls are all too often turned away, humiliated, or ostracized; subjected to emotional or physical abuse; or denied their right to health and bodily autonomy as a result of parental consent limitations. This frequent inability of young women and girls to access sexual and reproductive health services is often exacerbated by an absence of gender-sensitive and rights-based comprehensive sexuality education, further limiting their self-determination and ability to exercise meaningful and informed decision-making power in their lives. As a result of power and structural inequalities, women and girls who are particularly at risk of multiple and intersecting forms of inequality, disempowerment and discrimination include young and/or unmarried women and girls; women living with HIV; female sex workers; women of diverse sexual orientation and gender identities; women living with disabilities; indigenous women; rural women; and migrant women, among others.

Many of these ongoing issues stem from the lack of a real commitment to uphold and follow through on a comprehensive approach to women’s health, rights and wellbeing, of which their sexual and reproductive health and rights are an integral part. The Millennium Development Goals perpetuated a limited approach to women’s health by focusing almost exclusively on maternal health, itself defined narrowly by survival numbers and the presence of skilled birth attendants, as opposed to a comprehensive definition which includes women and girls’ autonomy, privacy and dignity rights. In doing so, the Millennium Development Goals effectively diverted focus from existing, more ambitious and rights based commitments on gender equality and women’s empowerment, and ignored the laudable commitments governments made five years earlier at the Fourth World Conference on Women.

As outlined in the Beijing Platform for Action, realizing the right to the highest attainable standard of mental and physical health for women, including their sexual and reproductive health and rights, is a linchpin for women’s empowerment and the development of a sustainable and just world. With 2015 marking not only the 20^th anniversary of the Platform for Action, but also the end of the period for the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals, we now have the opportunity to mobilize all actors for accelerated and effective implementation of the Platform for Action, and to incorporate into the Post-2015 Development Agenda an approach to women’s health that is comprehensive, holistic, and addresses all women’s needs and rights over the course of their lives. Such an approach must of course draw on, emphasize, and reinforce the existing commitments within international and regional human rights treaties, such as the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women, the Belem do Pará Convention and Maputo Protocol, among others.

Key recommendations for the agreed conclusions of the fifty-ninth session of the Commission on the Status of Women

• Reaffirm sexual and reproductive health and rights as human rights, integral to gender equality, women’s empowerment and sustainable development; and particularly reaffirm the sexual right of all women and girls to have control over their own bodies and sexuality, free from coercion, discrimination and violence.
• Eradicate all forms of violence and discrimination, including institutional violence, towards women based on age, sex, sexual orientation and gender identity, occupation, class, ethnicity, religion, disability, migrant or HIV status, among other grounds.
• Ensure the incorporation of the Beijing Platform for Action and outcome documents of the Beijing+20 review conferences into the Post-2015 Development Agenda.
• Thoroughly integrate human rights into the Post-2015 Development Agenda, with the understanding that any meaningful efforts towards sustainable development must posit people as the drivers of development rather than passive receivers of aid priorities and programming.
• Include under the proposed post-2015 Sustainable Development Goal on health: an indicator on unsafe abortion under the maternal mortality target; an indicator under the target on sexual and reproductive health care services, on the universal provision of and access to a full range of high-quality, voluntary, and user-friendly contraceptive methods, including emergency contraception; as well as an indicator on young people’s access to comprehensive sexual and reproductive health information, education and services.
• Include under the proposed post-2015 Sustainable Development Goal on gender equality: an indicator on the right to access safe abortion services under the target for sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights, recommending that governments review and repeal laws that criminalize voluntary abortion, and remove all legal and implementation barriers to ensuring access to safe, comprehensive, free, sensitive and high-quality procedures for pregnancy termination.
• Include specific indicators focused on women and young people throughout the proposed Sustainable Development Goals, so as to ensure that the human rights and empowerment of women, girls and young people are incorporated as a cross-cutting priority of the post-2015 development framework and its monitoring.
• In the implementation of the Post-2015 Development Agenda, prioritize the systematic and coordinated collection, analysis, and use of data disaggregated by sex, age, sexual orientation and gender identity, disability, location, income and other variables, to effectively monitor progress and ensure accountability.