Advancing safe motherhood through human rights
Cook, R.
Planned Parenthood Challenges 1: 3-5
1998
PMID: 12293656 Document Number: 273970
In order to reduce preventable maternal mortality, it is necessary to go beyond ensuring the development and availability of effective health interventions. What is needed is a recognition that maternal mortality is caused by women's inferior social status and that women's disempowerment from birth represents a cumulative social injustice that governments are obliged to remedy through application of their political, health, and legal systems. The challenge of effectively applying such a human rights perspective to safe motherhood is similar to that required in efforts to eliminate slavery or racial discrimination: the necessary reforms threaten conventional practices and value systems. The claim that safe motherhood is a human right will gather legitimacy when it is understood that denying this claim creates an injustice within the standards of fairness that societies hold dear. In addition, countries must recognize that this human rights claim arises from their own cultural values. Then, governments must be held accountable. Advancing safe motherhood through human rights will require a diagnosis of laws, policies, and social norms. The task must include inquiries into the nearly 600,000 annual maternal deaths, and it must meet the challenge of translating human rights into the rights of each person to be human. As 1998 celebrates the first 50 years since the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the next phase in human rights development must focus on the previously neglected interests of women.