A blog by Marge Berer, Editor Reproductive Health Matters. Originally posted on the blog of JALI – the Joint Action and Learning Initiative on National and Global Responsibilities for Health

I asked JALI if I could write a blog after I had read the minutes of the May 18 meeting in Geneva on the way forward for an FCGH,  to raise some issues that I’ve been confronting in the seemingly endless consultations and statements circulating on the internet on the post-2015 world – to do with what an MDG replacement would look like, whether or not universal health coverage as currently conceived is the answer to how to address health, and whether and where my issues of sexual and reproductive health and rights might fit into the “Sustainable Development Goals”, the most likely successor to the MDGs, when they have had such short shrift in the MDGs.

I was particularly struck by the paragraph on the two animating principles of a Framework Convention on Global Health mentioned in the minutes, that is, ‘global health equity (within and between countries) – “global health with justice,” as offered by Larry Gostin – and the right to health… setting clear standards to make it more concrete, measurable, and enforceable… addressing global governance for health… shifting international law towards health. It would ensure for all people the conditions required for health, including health care, public health, and social determinants of health, setting standards and establishing a national and global financing framework to enable universal access to and coverage of health care and public health measures (e.g., clean water, sufficient nutritious food)… directly address domestic inequities…[and] promoting Health in All Policies.’ (pp.2-3)

Just as people in the meeting raised the fact that some participants in the FCGH process required more explicit attention, e.g. health workers and health worker unions, as did some issues, e.g. mental health, I would like to raise three aspects that I think need to be part of the FCGH discussions:

i. Gender issues – that is, the differences between men and women in their health needs, their access to health and health care, and the inequities in that differential access. Gender issues in relation to health are crucial to any convention. There has been a lot of work by women’s health advocates on gender issues in relation to women’s health but far less work by either men or women on gender issues in relation to men’s health. In the same ways as girls’ and women’s health issues were at one time almost invisible in the previous century, attention to boys’ and men’s health issues has not been developed in the past 30 years, in spite of the growing attention to women’s health issues and wide-ranging work on gender, both in academia, by the women’s health movement and even in WHO. In a recent paper I was considering for publication, for example, it was said that gender-based violence against women was the most common form of violence, when in fact men experience far more violence globally overall, but between each other, whereas women experience violence mostly from men. Thus, work is needed on how to address gender issues within an FCGH in relation to the right to health, the social determinants of health, health financing, etc, and how this might be approached needs much more thought and consideration.
ii. Religious, political and “cultural” opposition to what an FCGH would stand for, being used most vocally today to justify why access to crucial aspects of health and health care related to sexuality and reproduction are being withheld and denied, and many sexual and reproductive rights condemned and criminalised. Underlying this opposition are two forms of hate: misogyny and hatred of any form of sexuality that is not heterosexual and heteronormative.

One of the reasons I support a Convention is that it would give greater weight to all these issues by requiring not only non-discrimination and equality, but also regular examination, analysis and critique of country programmes, along with official recommendations for policy and programmes, and demands for accountability and action through interpretation of the implementation of the convention. We are beginning to see such a framework making a difference in relation to sexual and reproductive rights issues, particularly via the work of CEDAW. So I recommend studying CEDAW’s history, functions, and procedures particularly and how they might be applied more broadly across health. I would be interested in being involved in this in the future.

iii. The process of developing the successor to the MDGs may cut out the few specific aspects of health and health care that were allowed into MDG 5, where they were mostly reduced to their lowest common denominator and stripped of their complexity, e.g. universal access to reproductive health was a late add-in to MDG 5, which never moved beyond superficial attention to a few aspects of reducing maternal mortality, diluted heavily by tacking newborns, infants and children onto “maternal” health, and omitting the great majority of interlinked sexual and reproductive health problems.

Universal health coverage in my opinion may also succeed in shortcutting and eliminating the “controversial issues” in whatever is included under a “unified health goal” post-2015, and it may also make support for addressing specific aspects of health equally or even more difficult. Having devoted two recent issues of Reproductive Health Matters to privatisation in sexual and reproductive health services, where articles provided evidence of a resulting increase in inequity of access to health care among the 4th and 5th socioeconomic quintiles of many African and Asian countries, I am worried that the health goal that is eventually agreed is likely to be biased one way or another towards consumerism, commercialisation and privatisation of health and health services, and their financial underpinnings such as health insurance. I am very uncertain of the value of what has emerged so far as regards universal coverage from WHO, given the pressure on the agency from the World Bank, big pharma, world trade policies, and the influence of private/foundation donors, when measured against what we would like to see as the basis for the Framework Convention on Global Health.