Preface
With this publication, the International Women's Health Coalition launches a new series of essays under the broad title "Reproductive Tracts: Issues and Innovations in Reproductive Health." Our purpose is to:
- provide fresh approaches to critical issues within the population and related fields;
- illuminate what is meant by a reproductive health approach;
- encourage constructive debate and dialogue; and
- stimulate the creation of women-centered reproductive health policies and programs.
The four essays included here are bound together by a common theme. Women's health advocates often see the world differently than demographers, contraceptive researchers, and policy makers. They see the range and calculus of women's reproductive choices from a different perspective. Women's health advocates seek to transform some of the key concepts, processes, and institutional structures currently used by the population field. We would make them more humane, and thus more responsive to the reality of women's lives.
Each essay challenges some point of "received wisdom" that affects women's reproductive health and rights. Addressing the process of contraceptive development, the first describes how the priorities of women's health advocates and the perceived needs of individual women may differ from those of scientists and other researchers. The second challenges some common demographic, medical, and public health assumptions underlying the calculation of the "relative risks" of contraception and pregnancy. Based on an understanding of the realities of women's lives, the third proposes an expanded definition of the "unmet need" for family planning, a definition that poses substantial challenges to policy makers and program managers. The fourth argues that abortion has been and always will be used by some women as a method of family planning.
The family planning field has accomplished a great deal in the past two decades by making contraceptives available to millions of the world's women. Much remains to be done, however. Women's health advocates propose a reproductive and sexual health and rights agenda, including access to safe abortion services; promotion and provision of condoms for birth control and as protection against infection; development of woman-controlled technologies to protect against both pregnancy and infection; forthright sex education to emphasize more equitable gender relations; and the connection of science to the human condition. If global population issues are to be addressed in ways that respond humanely and effectively to people's needs and concerns, women's voices must be heard.
The International Women's Health Coalition seeks to enable women's health advocates and the population/family planning fields to work collaboratively on solutions that promote social justice, equity, reproductive health, and basic human rights.
Joan B. Dunlop
President
International Women's Health Coalition
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