Women's committee notes impact of fertility on status of females.

Abstract

Experts in the 23-member Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women recently noted the beneficial impact of declines in fertility rates on improving the status of women. The Committee, which is the monitoring body for the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, emphasized during one of the sessions of its July meeting that, when the fertility rate declined, girls stayed in school longer, infant mortality also declined, and the status of women improved in general. Mr. Sethuramiah Rao, Director of UNFPA's Technical and Evaluation Division, speaking on behalf of Dr. Nafis Sadik, Executive Director, said that governments must be held accountable for protecting the reproductive and sexual rights of women. Consensus agreements reached at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) and the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women demonstrated that the world community now accepted that States were responsible for respecting and protecting reproductive and sexual rights and for enabling women to enjoy those rights, he said. The ICPD Program of Action placed reproductive and sexual health and rights at the center of the population and development agenda. It also committed governments to strive to ensure universal access by 2015 to comprehensive reproductive health care, including family planning and services to protect sexual health. In an exchange of views following the UNFPA presentation, experts spoke of the need for information campaigns on reproductive and sexual health issues. It was also reiterated that increasing awareness about motherhood and spacing of children were very important.