Beijing Platform for Action. Chapter IV. C. Women and Health – Paragraphs 106(c)-(e)
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/29
Strategic objective C.1.
Increase women’s access throughout life cycle to appropriate, affordable and quality health care, information and related services
Actions to be taken
106. By Governments, in collaboration with non-governmental organizations and employers’ and workers’ organizations and with the support of international institutions:
c. Design and implement, in cooperation with women and community-based organizations, gender-sensitive health programmes, including decentralized health services, that address the needs of women throughout their lives and take into account their multiple roles and responsibilities, the demands on their time, the special needs of rural women and women with disabilities and the diversity of women’s needs arising from age and socio-economic and cultural differences, among others; include women, especially local and indigenous women, in the identification and planning of health-care priorities and programmes; remove all barriers to women’s health services and provide a broad range of health-care services;
d. Allow women access to social security systems in equality with men throughout the whole life cycle;
e. Provide more accessible, available and affordable primary health-care services of high quality, including sexual and reproductive health care, which includes family planning information and services, and giving particular attention to maternal and emergency obstetric care, as agreed to in the Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development;
Beijing Declaration (1995)
Paragraph 106, sections (c), (d), and (e), deal with the working together of the non-governmental organizations and the various labour organizations with the support of a variety of institutions around the world.
The design and implementation of gendered programs oriented within this context can improve the outcomes for women and communities over time. In the short term, the benefits accrue to the women. In the medium term, we can see the benefits to the next generations with the benefits to the mothers running downstream in time to the kids and, thus, the families and communities as well.
Any help to women, in that sense, is a benefit to the communities, is an investment in the communities. There is a need to assist women as women but also women as the main source of life, families, and communities, in terms of the contributions to the next generation, to home care and child care, to the family unit’s fundamentals, and, therefore, to the communities.
An investment in women and girls is an investment in the health and wellness of society as a whole within this framework as well. Now, the roles, and associated tasks and responsibilities, of women are “multiple,” which simply creates a more complicated life script.
It is interesting. This becomes, in some ways, even more, true for the women who live in rural settings, with disabilities, or both. Life simply becomes more complicated, not only in the more numerous and nefarious difficulties in life but also the potential for restrictions on the women too.
Now, the basic need for many women is a base recognition of their rights, which is different from the standard transcendental ethics found in religious traditions.
This is non-trivial and important. The transcendent ethics put men at an advantage, with divine mandate, over women more often than not; the international rights traditions put women and men in the same line of ethical consideration, which aligns more with the abstracted core of the religious traditions’ ethical code or that identified by an exemplar of the “highest moral character,” according to Noam Chomsky, who goes by the name John Stuart Mill.
The Golden Rule recognizes women as equals. Human rights, in concrete terms and idealized stipulations, recognize women as the equals of men. Therefore, we can see, in some internationalist or globalist sense, the era of the democratization or universalization of ethics incorporates women into the expanded, idealized sphere of the Golden Rule. All the better.
The socio-economic and cultural differences can be a factor, as well, in the rights implementations of women regarding healthcare. Women and girls have fewer economic resources devoted to them. They have less money to work with; thus, they are more apt to be left out of the healthcare considerations of the nation.
This is, as per (d), something that then impacts the whole life cycle of girls and women less than boys and men. It is something where the equality of the sexes should be vigorously applied in order to close the society security systems gap within the context of health care.
Also, there should be more affordable and accessible primary healthare too. As we see with sexual and reproductive health measures, women tend to be not at the top of the list. This would include things as simple as family planning provisions to as controversial and ethically murky as abortions.
But this can also incude emergency obstetric case too. In addition, this should all be born in mind with the agreements, the promises in other words and so ethical obligations, and the international community and nations to work to improve women’s and girls’ equality in the healthcare domains.
–One can find similar statements in other documents, conventions, declarations and so on, with the subsequent statements of equality or women’s rights:
- The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the Preamble, Article 16, and Article 25(2).
- Convention Against Discrimination in Education (1960) in Article 1.
- The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966) in Article 3, Article 7, and Article 13.
- International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966).
- Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (1979).
- Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1984).
- The Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (1993).
- Beijing Declaration(1995).
- United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000).
- Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children (2000).
- The Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa or the “Maputo Protocol” (2003).
- Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence or the Istanbul Convention (2011) Article 38 and Article 39.
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