Women's Reproductive Rights and Child Health in Haryana

Reproductive rights embrace certain human rights that are already recognized in national laws, international human rights documents and other relevant United Nations consensus documents. When speaking or writing about Women's reproductive rights and child health care with a special emphasis on Haryana, we can't ignore that whoever we are, wherever we live, all the decisions we make about our own body should be ours.

Yet all over the world, many of us are persecuted for making our own choices and many more are prevented from making any choices at all. Governments are trying to dictate who we can kiss, who we should love, how we must dress, how we identify ourselves, when we have children, and how many we have.

Sexual and reproductive rights mean we should be able to make our own decisions about our body and get accurate information about these issues, access sexual and reproductive health services including contraception, choose if, when and who to marry, and decide if you want to have children and how many. Besides our lives should be free from all forms of sexual violence, including rape, female genital mutilation, forced pregnancy, forced abortion and forced sterilization.

Reproductive rights began to develop as a subset of human rights at the United Nation's 1968 International Conference on Human Rights. The resulting non binding Proclamation of Teheran was the first international document to recognize one of these rights when it stated that: "Parents have a basic human right to determine freely and responsibly the number and the spacing of their children."