| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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Hendriks (1995) identified the 1980s as the turning point when policymakers, scientists, and women's health and rights activists began to acknowledge the intrinsic relationship between health and human rights. Women's health advocates argue that population control policies and family planning programs should protect personal integrity and provide more holistic approaches to women's health services, particularly in the area of reproductive health (Garcia-Moreno & Claro, 1994). A 1991 report by the WHO and the International Women's Coalition (Germain 1991) suggested that improvements in women's reproductive health inevitably help empower women with control over their own fertility and sexuality under conditions of voluntary choice and minimum health problems. The effect of these policies on reproductive health is often mediated by a set of structural and values-related variables that create conditions of gender inequality. Feminist demographers have been addressing this issue by asking how a reproductive health approach might be the basis for responsible population policies (Dixon-Mueller, 1993) and what a feminist population policy might look like (Berer, 1991). The literature on feminist approaches to reproductive health is widely scattered—and thus inconsistent—with respect to explaining different dimensions of reproductive health. The effects of gender-related biases on reproductive health remain underinvestigated empirically. In addition, available studies by feminist scholars on reproductive health “have been case studies and have not engaged the conceptual frameworks and empirical finding of the mainstream literature” (Orloff, 1993, p. 304).
Another major gap in the literature on reproductive health is the lack of measurement scales for testing and assessing women's reproductive health status. A number of reasons can be raised for the lack of a standard measurement of this concept. These include the inability to generalize research findings, the