PHA-Exchange> Women's Health in a Free Market Economy

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- from María Hamlin Zúniga <maria at 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 Conference 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 reproductive 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 million 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 comprehensive reproductive health services.

Indeed, health services in many countries are in terminal decline. 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 departments.

These four trends can be attributed in large measure to the implementation
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 political
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,
www.thecornerhouse.org.uk, in html and PDF formats.

Please contact us enquiries at 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






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