May 28

International Day of Action for Women's Health

1987 - 2007

Twenty Years in the Struggle for Women’s Health and Rights

2007 Call for Action: “Women’s Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights: Repoliticizing our Perspective, Repoliticizing our Demands”

The year 2007 marks two decades since the first International Day of Action for Women’s Health was held for the defense and promotion of women’s health and rights. Today, we must confront new social, political, economic and cultural challenges in the current global scenario and draw attention to the impact of these factors on women’s comprehensive health.

For this reason, the Latin American and Caribbean Women’s Health Network (LACWHN) is launching a call to repoliticize our actions and – once again taking up the paradigm of sexual and reproductive health and rights from the International Conference on Population and Development (Cairo 1994) – to demand that women do not continue to pay for the exercise of their sexuality and reproduction with their lives and health while governments and international power groups refuse to comprehend that investments made in women are much more productive than investments in arms.

Campaign Objectives

-- Repoliticize the approach to women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights in the context of the current global and regional conditions and based on the ICPD paradigm

-- Encourage the women of our member groups to take political action to defend their sexual and reproductive health and rights from a perspective of gender equity and human rights.

Background

The Latin American and Caribbean Women’s Health Network proposed the creation of a global day of action for women’s health at a 1987 meeting of the Women’s Global Network for Reproductive Rights (WGNRR) in Costa Rica following the 5th International Women and Health Meeting. May 28 was chosen as the International Day of Action for Women’s Health.

From 1988 to 1996, the overarching theme was the prevention of maternal mortality and morbidity. Maternal mortality is a daily tragedy in most developing countries where at least a half million women die each year due to largely preventable causes related to pregnancy, childbirth, the post-partum period and unsafe abortion. More than a thousand women’s organizations from 45 countries participated in the first campaign. Today, thousands of women around the world take part in the May 28 activities.

In 1996 after eight years of the campaign, the coordinating networks -- the Women’s Global Network for Reproductive Rights and the Latin American and Caribbean Women’s Health Network -- decided to redefine their approach to better take into account new global and regional realities. Since then LACWHN has coordinated the Campaign for the Exercise of Sexual Rights and Reproductive Rights in Latin America and the Caribbean with different calls for action aimed at:

-- defending the exercise of these rights as human rights and as a condition necessary for the full enjoyment of sexual and reproductive health;

-- demanding their inclusion in public policies and programs; and

-- demanding legislation that guarantees these rights for all people without discrimination of any kind.

In consideration of the continued disparity between the daily reality of women’s health and the paradigm of sexual and reproductive health and rights agreed to at the ICPD and validated at the Fourth World Conference on Women (Beijing, 1995), LACWHN has launched a new campaign for 2007 to 2009.

Issues to be Addressed

Women’s health is not an exclusively biological phenomenon. On the contrary, it is the sum total of social, economic, political, cultural and, of course, biological factors that can lead to optimal health or to illness. However, above all, gender differences must be taken into account especially how these affect women’s enjoyment of their right to health.

The 2007 Call for Action therefore proposes the analysis and repoliticization of priority issues that most clearly reflect women’s gender-based inequity in health, which requires urgent responses from public decision-makers. These issues are:

-- The persistence of high rates of maternal death in recent decades, which often are related to a general worsening of women’s health status, to gender discrimination, to higher levels of poverty affecting women and to crises in health systems.

-- The criminalization of abortion, the imprisonment of women who have had abortions and the strengthening of fundamentalist discourses against freedom of reproductive choice.

-- Restricted access to essential sexual and reproductive health services due to a decrease in donor funding as a result of ideological pressure. This situation has resulted in an unsatisfied demand for contraception (including emergency contraception) and STD/HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment.

-- The lack of public policies sensitive to gender equity in health and fundamentalist sectors’ establishment of barriers that hinder the formulation of such policies.

-- The absence of laws within countries that legally recognize sexual and reproductive rights and guarantee that all individuals may exercise these rights free from discrimination.

Participation

These topics provide a guide that will enable groups to respond to our call for action through the implementation of one of the following activities:

-- Informing and raising public awareness through acts, marches, street events, etc.;

-- Actions of denunciation (press conference, actions with the media, petitions);

-- Research (production of knowledge);

-- Exchange of knowledge and skills (workshops, training sessions, etc., targeted towards health professionals, police officers, teachers, students, other women’s NGOs, community leaders, etc.);

-- Lobbying of public decision-makers and lawmakers.

The member groups who take part in this three-year campaign (2007-2009) will monitor the public impact of their initiatives and follow up on the results obtained and undertake ongoing actions related to their campaign topic.

For more information about this advocacy campaign, contact LACWHN at:secretaria@reddesalud.org

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