Reproductive Health and Human Rights Integrating Medicine, Ethics, and Law

Rebecca Cook, Bernard Dickens, and Mahmoud Fathalla, leading international authorities on reproductive medicine, human rights, medical law, and bioethics, integrate their disciplines to provide an accessible but comprehensive introduction to reproductive and sexual health. They analyze fifteen case-studies, representing a wide array of recurrent problems, focusing particularly on resource-poor settings. Approaches to resolution are considered at clinical and health system levels. They also consider the kinds of social change that would relieve the underlying conditions of reproductive health dilemmas.

The concept of reproductive health promises to play a crucial role in improving women's health and rights around the world. It was internationally endorsed by a United Nations conference in 1994, but remains controversial because of the challenge it presents to conservative agencies: it challenges policies of suppressing public discussion on human sexuality and regulating its private expressions. Reproductive Health and Human Rights is designed to equip healthcare providers and administrators to integrate ethical, legal, and human rights principles in protection and promotion of reproductive health, and to inform lawyers and women's health advocates about aspects of medicine and healthcare systems that affect reproduction. Rebecca Cook, Bernard Dickens, and Mahmoud Fathalla, leading international authorities on reproductive medicine, human rights, medical law, and bioethics, integrate their disciplines to provide an accessible but comprehensive introduction to reproductive and sexual health. They analyse fifteen case-studies of recurrent problems, focusing particularly on resource-poor settings. Approaches to resolution are considered at clinical and health system levels. They also consider kinds of social change that would relieve the underlying conditions of reproductive health dilemmas. Supporting the explanatory chapters and case-studies are extensive resources of epidemiological data, human rights documents, and research materials and websites on reproductive and sexual health. In explaining ethics, law, and human rights to healthcare providers and administrators, and reproductive health to lawyers and women's health advocates, the authors explore and illustrate limitations and dysfunctions of prevailing health systems and their legal regulation, but also propose opportunities for reform. They draw on the values and principles of ethics and human rights recognized in national and international legal systems, to guide healthcare providers and administrators, lawyers, governments, and national and international agencies and legal tribunals. Reproductive Health and Human Rights will be an invaluable resource for all those working to improve services and legal protection for women around the world. Updates to this book, and information on translations to French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese and Arabic are now available at www.law.utoronto.ca/faculty/cook/ReproductiveHealth.html

1 - Introduction and Overview
2 - Reproductive and Sexual Health
3 - Health Care Systems
4 - Ethics
5 - Legal Origins and Principles
6 - Human Rights Principles
7 - Implementation of Legal and Human Rights Principles
A - OVERVIEW
B - CASE STUDIES: FROM PRINCIPLE TO PRACTICE
1 - Female genital cutting (circumcision/mutilation)
2 - An adolescent girl seeking sexual and reproductive health care
3 - Sexual assault and emergency contraception
4 - Hymen reconstruction
5 - A request for medically assisted reproduction
6 - Involuntary female sterilization
7 - Counselling and caring for an HIV positive woman
8 - HIV drug research and testing
9 - Responding to a request for pregnancy termination
10 - Prenatal and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis for risk of dysgenic inheritance
11 - Sex selection abortion
12 - Treating a woman with an incomplete abortion
13 - Confidentiality and unsafe abortion
14 - Domestic violence
15 - A maternal death