Sexual and reproductive health and rights is an essential building block to achieving gender equality. SRHR encompasses the different human rights related to sexuality and reproduction, such as sexual health, sexual rights, reproductive health, and reproductive rights. Everyone, including children and adolescents, is entitled to SRHR. It’s an essential part of universal health coverage, which doesn’t only include the absence of disease or dysfunction, but also ensures physical, emotional, mental, and social well-being. Attaining the goals of sustainable, equitable development requires that individuals are able to exercise control over their sexual and reproductive lives. This includes the rights to
- Reproductive and sexual health as a component of overall health, throughout the life cycle, for both men and women
- Reproductive decision-making, including voluntary choice in marriage, family formation and determination of the number, timing and spacing of one's children and the right to have access to the information and means needed to exercise voluntary choice
- Equality and equity for men and women, to enable individuals to make free and informed choices in all spheres of life, free from discrimination based on gender
- Sexual and reproductive security, including freedom from sexual violence and coercion, and the right to privacy.
Women’s sexual and reproductive health is related to multiple human rights, including the right to life, the right to be free from torture, the right to health, the right to privacy, the right to education, and the prohibition of discrimination. violations of women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights are frequent and take many forms including: denial of access to services that only women require, poor quality services, subjecting women’s access to services to third party authorization, forced sterilization, forced virginity examinations, and forced abortion, without women’s prior consent; female genital mutilation (FGM), and early marriage.
Violations of women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights are often due to deeply ingrained beliefs and societal values pertaining to women’s sexuality. Patriarchal concepts of women’s roles within the family mean that women are often valued based on their ability to reproduce. Early marriage and pregnancy, or repeated pregnancies spaced too closely together has a devastating impact on women’s health with sometimes fatal consequences. Women are also often blamed for infertility, suffering ostracism and being subjected to various human rights violations as a result. In a region that is torn out by wars and man made disasters, violations of women and adolescent girls SRH&Rs are usually neglected, that is why at the Alliance we are trying to shed light on these issues and work on several country focused and regional programmes that promotes the reproductive rights, and women freedom to choose if and when they want to have children and start a family.
