The Distance Between Us: Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights of Rural Women and Girls

Abstract

Geography impacts the realization of sexual and reproductive health rights. The unspoken assumption is that rural life mirrors the characteristics of urban life and that geography plays little role in the enjoyment of human rights. But differences between urban and rural settings make a crucial difference to how rights materialize in rural life. In human rights law, little attention is given to how the rural-urban divide affects the realization of sexual and reproductive health rights of women and girls. The neglect of rurality is unwarranted. It is a meaningful, often lynch-pin, explanatory factor for rural girls and women’s lack of access to sexual and reproductive health rights. An exception to this overall global trend is the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). CEDAW is unique among United Nations (UN) treaties in that art. 14 protects the equal rights of rural women in various fields of life. The analysis in this chapter, however, pays attention to how gender and rurality interact with other more well recognized inter-sectional identities. It explores how the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW Committee), the body tasked with monitoring the implementation of CEDAW, has developed the treaty in relation to rural women and girls’ sexual and reproductive health rights. The analysis in this chapter serves as a call for action to conceptualizing rurality as an identity characteristic under an inter-sectional human rights framework and a springboard for deeper engagement with the difference rurality makes to all human rights in both international and domestic human rights law.