Rights and Needs: Rethinking the Connections in Debates over Reproductive and Sexual Rights

Abstract

t the March 1999 Preparatory Committee Meeting for the United Nations General Assembly Special Session's five-year review of the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD+5), the pro-family newspaper Vivant! published a feature artiele, replete with statistical data and graphics, condemning the human rights-based approach to health.' Central to the article's attack was an argument embracing the discourse of basic as a framework ethically and socially superior to that of human rights. Associating such infrastructural conditions as safe water and nutrition with the approach and reproductive and sexual health with the approach, it alleged that indiscriminate funding for the ICPD's idealistically high standards of reproductive and sexual health rights had caused underfunding and deterioration of more basic, practicable and affordable health (emphasis added). The article further insinuated that such flawed priorities reflect a Western agenda (read, of Western feminists) with a blatant disregard for the genuine needs and priorities of women in the South.2 One does not have to defend the deplorable record of the U.S. government and U.S.-based corporations with regard to Southern women's health needs to see that this rhetoric has a primary strategic aim: to demonstrate the