Inter Press Service - November 30, 2004
Mario Osava

The importance of sexual and reproductive health in achieving the MDGs in Latin America and the Caribbean was highlighted at a symposium held Tuesday in Rio de Janeiro, attended by close to 200 representatives of organisations and agencies involved in the fields of health care, women's rights, gender issues, family planning and AIDS.

The symposium was preceded on Monday by a meeting of Brazilian activists, while an earlier IPPF/WHR symposium, "Sex and the Hemisphere", was held in New York City on Oct. 20.

The Millennium Development Goals, which will be reviewed in 2005, "do not consider the role of family planning in the development process," said Carmen Barroso, director of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, Western Hemisphere Region (IPPF/WHR), which sponsored the meeting.

One of the needs emphasised by the organisation is access to contraceptives and information on their use, side effects and alternatives, allowing people to make their own decisions, she told IPS.

Other objectives that should be taken into account include an end to the discrimination and stigma suffered by sexual minorities and people with HIV/AIDS, and to unequal access to health care across ethnic groups and social classes.

The MDGs include recommendations from all of the major U.N. conferences held throughout the 1990s, with the sole exception of the International Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo, Egypt in 1994, said Alejandra Meglioli, an IPPF/WHR representative in Brazil.

Sexual and reproductive rights are only indirectly and partially connected to three of the eight U.N. goals, a fact that was emphasised at the symposium.

Those goals are No. 3, "Promote gender equality and empower women," No. 5, "Improve maternal health," and No. 6, "Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases."

The MDGs, adopted by 189 countries at the 2000 U.N. Millennium Summit, also establish targets for reducing extreme poverty, hunger and infant mortality, achieving universal primary education, ensuring environmental sustainability, and developing a global partnership for development, all by the year 2015.

The conclusions of the Fourth U.N. World Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995 are not duly incorporated into the MDGs either, according to representatives of women's rights and reproductive health organisations.

To correct these omissions, a worldwide movement has emerged, with the formation of ten groups of experts from civil society organisations, universities, U.N. agencies and governments who will discuss and prepare proposals for the review of the MDGs next year.

The Beijing+10 Conference, which will also be held in 2005 to evaluate the results of the Fourth World Conference on Women ten years later, is another source of mobilisation around these issues.

Opinions are divided between those who want to add a specific goal of universal access to sexual and reproductive rights, and those who want these rights more explicitly identified within the relevant goals and targets already defined, Barroso said.

There are also activists in Latin America who believe it would be useless to incorporate new "reduction goals" that do not reflect the much more wide-ranging recommendations adopted at the conferences in Cairo and Beijing, Meglioli told IPS.

In any event, the regional symposia being held to discuss this issue are aimed at applying pressure to ensure that sexual and reproductive rights, along with related indicators, are addressed both by the MDGs and on a societal level.

Meglioli, an Argentine sociologist, stressed that these themes should not only form part of government commitments, like those established by the MDGs, but should also be a matter of public concern.

For his part, Ney Costa, director of the Brazilian organisation Family Welfare, emphasised the need to guarantee women's rights and full access to information on birth control, family planning, abortion, prenatal health, gynecological cancer and AIDS.

Other issues, like labour and employment, are equally overlooked by the MDGs, which has led to demands from other movements, Meglioli noted.

The symposium addressed obstacles to the universalisation of sexual and reproductive rights, such as the prevailing world economic order, which has led to higher degrees of inequality and exclusion.

Ethnic and racial inequalities also need to be addressed, since both infant and maternal mortality are much higher among blacks than among whites, and blacks have much more limited access to the health care system in Brazil, according to Maria Ines Barbosa with the Brazilian government's Special Secretariat for the Promotion of Racial Equality.

The eradication of homophobia was a goal put forward by the Brazilian gay movement, represented by Luis Mott, head of the Gay Association of Bahia.

Mott, who spoke about the discrimination suffered by sexual minorities, referred to Brazil as the "world champion in gay-bashing murders," with an average of one gay man killed every two days.

In the meantime, Maria Cristina Pimenta, an AIDS prevention specialist from the Brazilian Ministry of Health, said that reproductive rights are denied to people infected with HIV.

A recent study revealed that in Sao Paulo (Brazil's most populous city), 50.6 percent of HIV-positive women were sterilised, as opposed to only 3.4 percent of women in the general population.

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+ BEMFAM - in Portuguese (http://www.bemfam.org.br)

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