Five Lessons for Advancing Maternal Health Rights in an Age of Neoliberal Globalization and Conservative Backlash

After considerable progress in recent decades, maternal mortality and morbidity (MMM) either stagnated or worsened in most regions of the globe between 2016 and 2020. The world should be outraged given that we have known the key interventions necessary for preventing MMM for over three-quarters of a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Health and human rights 2023-06, Vol.25 (1), p.185-194
Main Author: YAMIN, ALICIA ELY
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Advocacy
GENERAL PAPERS
Global health
Globalization
Health
Health disparities
Health status
Human rights
Justice
Litigation
Maternal & child health
Maternal characteristics
Maternal mortality
Morbidity
Neoliberalism
Pandemics
Political economy
Populism
Reproductive rights
Social inequality
Socioeconomic factors
Women
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Summary:After considerable progress in recent decades, maternal mortality and morbidity (MMM) either stagnated or worsened in most regions of the globe between 2016 and 2020. The world should be outraged given that we have known the key interventions necessary for preventing MMM for over three-quarters of a century. Since the 1990s, human rights advocacy on MMM has gained crucial ground, demonstrating that entitlements related to maternal health are judicially enforceable and delineating rights-based approaches to health in the context of MMM. Nonetheless, evident retrogressions, coupled with ballooning social inequalities, redoubled austerity post-pandemic, and a conservative populist backlash against reproductive rights, underscore the steep challenges we face. This paper offers five lessons gleaned from what we have achieved during the past 30 years of human rights advocacy on maternal health, and where we have fallen short: (1) maternal health is not a technical challenge alone and is inseparable from reproductive justice; (2) reproductive justice requires strengthening health system infrastructures; (3) we must center the political economy of global health in our advocacy, not just national policies; (4) litigation is part of a larger advocacy toolkit, not a go-it-alone strategy; and (5) we must use metrics that tell us why women are dying and what to do.
ISSN:1079-0969
2150-4113