Family planning and gender equality: Ensuring women and girls are able to reach their full potential
Access to safe, voluntary family planning is a human right and research and policies show clearly that family planning is central to gender equality. File photo
Updated: Mar 8, 2021, 03:33 PM IST
Just over 25 years ago, two global events – the International Conference on Population and Development, Cairo and the Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing– recognised on a global stage that women’s health and reproductive choices cannot be separate from human rights. According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) access to sexual and reproductive healthcare is essential for women’s empowerment, safety, gender equality and poverty reduction. And yet in 2021, millions of women and adolescent girls continue to lack access and information to these sexual and reproductive health services which are so crucial to their well-being.
On International Women s Day, civil rights organisations called for gender equality, violence-free life and renewed pledge to invest in women s leadership building in the post-pandemic world. Nobel laureate Kailash Satyarthi noted that it will be Women s Day in its true sense when no daughter of India will feel insecure to go out alone at any time, when the 6-year-old daughter of the poorest mother in a backward village will dream like my 6-year-old grandson and move shoulder to shoulder with him . Amitabh Behar, CEO, Oxfam India stressed on the need to stand in solidarity with women s struggles for their rights, dignity, status as workers, farmers, owners of property, as deserving of equal wages and above all a violence-free life.
Even as the ban improved the sex ratio, females born – in 34 states and Union Territories that enacted the ban – were 2.3 percentage points, 3.5 percentage points and 3.2 percentage points less likely to complete Class 10, Class 12 and enter university, relative to males, the authors wrote.
“We often end up swapping one kind of discrimination for another,” Sharma told
IndiaSpend. “Pre-natal discrimination here is swapped for post-natal discrimination because son preference is so deeply ingrained in our population.”
The ban on sex-selection abortions has no effect on higher-income households, Sharma said. “These households are able to circumvent the ban and continue to sex select, and when they do have daughters, they do not discriminate against them.”
How Policies To Reduce Gender Discrimination Can Have The Opposite Effect indiaspend.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from indiaspend.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Updated Feb 22, 2021 | 12:46 IST
For many adolescent girls, one’s first period can be a confusing time. Underscored by feelings of not belonging, neither identifying as a child nor as an adult. Healthy menstruation: Tips for better menstrual health, and hygiene among teenagers | Photo Credit: iStock Images
New Delhi: As we grow up, we start to realise and understand more about our bodies, their needs and wants. We also learn to take better care of it, both in terms of hygiene, as well as what we feed it and how we keep it. However, when we are teenagers with little knowledge and guidance, we may not have the means to do so. A teenager s body goes through several changes - and one major change in the case of young girls is that of menstruation. Adolescent girls usually begin their monthly periods by age 11-13, and all of this is too new for them to process. At the same time, given the taboo about the subject in society, they may find it diff