Family Planning is an Unrealized Human Right

Forty years ago this month, family planning was officially declared a universal human right by the United Nations International Conference on Human Rights, meeting in Tehran. The Roman Catholic Church was among those present when the gathering declared that “Parents have a basic human right to determine freely and responsibly the number and spacing of their children.”

But governments around the world continue to deny this right – most recently in Chile.

On April 4, Chile’s Constitutional Court barred public health facilities from continuing to distribute emergency contraceptives. Much of the population depends on these facilities for their basic care. With abortion illegal under all circumstances in Chile, this decision removes one more way for women to avoid unintended pregnancy.

In the Philippines, hospitals and clinics in Manila City have been banned since 2000 from distributing any kind of modern birth control. Last year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration denied over-the-counter access to emergency contraception to women under 18. And international funding from donor countries and agencies for family planning has declined steadily since 1995.

More than 200 million women worldwide have an unmet need for contraceptives. Demand is expected to grow by 40 percent in the next 15 years: half the people on earth are under 25 and every year millions more of them become sexually active and seek smaller families. At the moment, 190 million women become pregnant each year, about half of them unintentionally. Nearly 50 million resort to abortions. One woman dies every minute from pregnancy-related complications – more than ten million deaths per generation.

One in three of these deaths could be avoided if women who want to use effective contraception had access to it. Family planning is a recognized human right, but it is not yet a reality.

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