Throughout the 1990s and into this decade, a number of international
conferences held under the auspices of the United Nations drew
attention to the needs of women and adolescents, with a particular
focus on their sexual and reproductive health and rights. Recognizing
the growing strength and capacity of the international women’s
movement, IWHC played a leadership role in mobilizing women and young
people for participation in these conferences, most notably for the
International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), held in
Cairo in 1994. At this conference, 179 governments agreed to a
progressive, comprehensive 20-year Programme of Action that strives to
strike a balance between the world’s people and its resources. This
Programme of Action was the first to place women’s reproductive and
sexual health and rights at the center of an international agreement on
population, a field that had previously been dominated by strategies
that sought to control women’s fertility and meet demographic targets
with little recognition of women’s sexual and reproductive autonomy or
human rights. This change in approach is commonly known as the “Cairo
paradigm shift.”
Several conferences held during the years that followed—including the Fourth World Conference on Women (FWCW, Beijing, 1995), the five-year implementation reviews of ICPD (ICPD Plus Five, New York, 1999) and FWCW (FWCW Plus Five, New York, 2000), and the United Nations General Assembly Special Sessions on HIV/AIDS (New York, 2001) and Children
(New York, 2002)—offered opportunities to strengthen and advance the
commitments made at Cairo. Together with international feminist
alliances like HERA (Health, Empowerment, Rights, and Accountability),
IWHC continued to mobilize women and young people to participate in
these conferences, and succeeded in convincing governments to set more
ambitious targets related to safe abortion, HIV prevention,
contraception, and obstetric care. We also continued our support for
local advocates who rely on these agreements as tools to lobby their
own governments for an increased commitment to ensuring women and
adolescents’ sexual and reproductive health and rights in the form of
legislation, budgetary allocations, sexuality education curricula, and
new programs and services.
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