Women’s Rights are Human Rights

By Seema Jalan

I’ve worked for women’s rights and equality for more than 15 years, and it amazes me that today, on International Women’s Day in 2018, I still have to say these words: Women’s rights are human rights.

This is not revolutionary. It’s not up for debate. But somehow, it’s under threat now more than ever.

Building on unprecedented hits to women’s reproductive rights — in the form of the expanded Global Gag Rule, the defunding of UNFPA, and proposed slashes to bilateral funding for family planning — the Trump Administration has dealt yet another blow to our health and rights at home and abroad. Recent news reports indicate that the U.S. State Department plans to trim language about women’s reproductive rights and about racial, ethnic, and sexual discrimination in its annual global Human Rights Report, glossing over or eliminating its documentation of some of the most harmful and rampant human rights abuses around the world.

Supporting human rights — including women’s reproductive rights — has long been a mainstay of U.S. foreign policy. The Human Rights Report has served as a symbol of this support, and a key tool to shed light on human rights abuses around the world and hold countries to task for their actions. Any version of this report that excludes the rights of girls, women, LGBTQI people, and other marginalized groups around the world is simply incomplete.

I am proud to have joined more than 170 partners in the human rights, health, and development sectors to say unilaterally to the State Department that this will not stand — and urge Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to reverse course:

“As organizations committed to gender equality and women’s human rights, we see in our work how violations of these internationally-recognized human rights are often among the most frequent and egregious abuses women and girls experience. Gender discrimination is a pernicious societal harm that impacts women’s realization of their human rights in extensive and often irrevocable ways. International human rights authorities have clearly established governments’ human rights obligations in the many ways such discrimination is manifest — from violence against women, to maternal mortality, to restrictions on women’s access to comprehensive reproductive and sexual health. Willful failure to include reporting on these rights violations is a callous disregard both of the abuses experienced by women and girls and of established human rights norms that recognize the government obligations to end them.” — Letter from civil society organizations to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson

I also commend the leadership of Sen. Blumenthal and the nine other senators who wrote their own letter denouncing the news and calling for answers from the State Department on this critical matter.

All 193 UN member states — including the U.S. — committed through the Sustainable Development Goals to the fundamental idea that women’s reproductive rights are key to an equitable world. As we inch closer to the target date to achieve those goals, the U.S. administration must stay true to this commitment. Now is the time to build on progress, not reverse it; Human rights are on the line.

Learn more about the Universal Access Project and get involved at www.universalaccessproject.org.