What is "reproductive rights"

n. Rights associated with family planning, such as birth control and abortion.

Reproductive rights are legal rights and freedoms relating to reproduction and reproductive health. The World Health Organization defines reproductive rights as follows:

Reproductive rights rest on the recognition of the basic right of all couples and individuals to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing and timing of their children and to have the information and means to do so, and the right to attain the highest standard of sexual and reproductive health. They also include the right of all to make decisions concerning reproduction free of discrimination, coercion and violence.

Women's reproductive rights may include some or all of the following: the right to legal and safe abortion; the right to birth control; freedom from coerced sterilization and contraception; the right to access good-quality reproductive healthcare; and the right to education and access in order to make free and informed reproductive choices. Reproductive rights may also include the right to receive education about sexually transmitted infections and other aspects of sexuality, and protection from practices such as female genital mutilation (FGM).

Reproductive rights began to develop as a subset of human rights at the United Nation's 1968 International Conference on Human Rights. The resulting non binding Proclamation of Teheran was the first international document to recognize one of these rights when it stated that: "Parents have a basic human right to determine freely and responsibly the number and the spacing of their children." States, though, have been slow in incorporating these rights in internationally legally binding instruments. Thus, while some of these rights have already been recognized in hard law, that is, in legally binding international human rights instruments, others have been mentioned only in non binding recommendations and, therefore, have at best the status of soft law in international law, while a further group is yet to be accepted by the international community and therefore remains at the level of advocacy.Center for Reproductive Rights, International Legal Program, Establishing International Reproductive Rights Norms: Theory for Change, US CONG. REC. 108th CONG. 1 Sess. E2534 E2547 (Rep. Smith) (Dec. 8, 2003):

We have been leaders in bringing arguments for a woman's right to choose abortion within the rubric of international human rights. However, there is no binding hard norm that recognizes women's right to terminate a pregnancy. (...) While there are hard norms prohibiting sex discrimination that apply to girl adolescents, these are problematic since they must be applied to a substantive right (i.e., the right to health) and the substantive reproductive rights of adolescents are not `hard' (yet!). There are no hard norms on age discrimination that would protect adolescents' ability to exercise their rights to reproductive health, sexual education, or reproductive decisionmaking. In addition, there are no hard norms prohibiting discrimination based on marital status, which is often an issue with respect to unmarried adolescents' access to reproductive health services and information. The soft norms support the idea that the hard norms apply to adolescents under 18. They also fill in the substantive gaps in the hard norms with respect to reproductive health services and information as well as adolescents' reproductive autonomy. (...) There are no hard norms in international human rights law that directly address HIV/AIDS directly. At the same time, a number of human rights bodies have developed soft norms to secure rights that are rendered vulnerable by the HIV/AIDS epidemic. (...) Practices with implications for women's reproductive rights in relation to HIV/AIDS are still not fully covered under existing international law, although soft norms have addressed them to some extent. (...) There is a lack of explicit prohibition of mandatory testing of HIV-positive pregnant women under international law. (...) None of the global human rights treaties explicitly prohibit child marriage and no treaty prescribes an appropriate minimum age for marriage. The onus of specifying a minimum age at marriage rests with the states' parties to these treaties. (...) We have to rely extensively on soft norms that have evolved from the TMBs and that are contained in conference documents to assert that child marriage is a violation of fundamental human rights.

Issues related to reproductive rights are some of the most vigorously contested rights' issues worldwide, regardless of the population's socioeconomic level, religion or culture.

The issue of reproductive rights is frequently presented as being of vital importance in discussions and articles by population concern organizations such as Population Matters.

Reproductive rights are a subset of sexual and reproductive health and rights.