WGNRR-Tanya's blog

There are six bills related to reproductive health that have been currently  proposed for  the Philippine House of Representatives to review. Only one bill, the Comprehensive Reproductive Health Act,   brings a holistic perspective to the debate, challenging the government and society at large to address the broader issues surrounding the well-being, health and rights of Filipino women.

Development Alternatives with Women for A New Era (DAWN) have written a concise and apt  analysis about the MDGs, allowing reproductive and sexual rights defenders to understand how the MDGs "have created silos of intervention in development strategies and plans. Government programs and official projects are focused on targets and indicators and less concerned about inter-sectoral approaches", and why in particular, MDG related maternal mortality programming channels energy and resources away from a holistic sexual and reproductive rights and justice approach. They explain:"Lacking the holistic analytic of the Programmes of Action from the International Conference on Population and Development and the Fourth World Conference on Women and often de-contextualized from past global consensuses around human rights, gender equality, and development, tracking “progress” of the MDGs dangerously resembles a demographic numbers game." Read the article here.

Michelle Movahed, Center for Reproductive Rights, 24 August, 2010--This week, for the first time, the United States submitted a report to the U.N. Human Rights Council, a rotating body of countries that peer-review U.N. member countries’ human rights records.  This submission is historic.  Where the Bush administration spent years criticizing the U.N. and human rights processes, in this report the Obama administration has stressed an end to U.S. human rights exceptionalism, quoting Hillary Clinton’s statement that “[h]uman rights are universal . . . .   That is why we are committed to “holding everyone to the same [human rights] standards, including ourselves.” 

On August 19th, the Philippine Inquirer reported that:

A group of women human rights defenders has appealed to President Benigno Aquino III to “heed the call for justice” and release a jailed nursing mother.... "The mother and child's detention speaks of the continued injustice against Oliveros and the rest of the Morong 43,” said Cristina Palabay, convenor of Tanggol Bai.