This year, RESURJ, along with allies and accomplices, gathered to attend the 57th Session of the Commission on Population and Development in what promised to be an important beacon for sexual and reproductive rights with the celebration of the 30 years since the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994. We were motivated to be part of the space to recommit to a transformed agenda with a political clarity for the realization of sexual and reproductive justice over the next decades. We attended with a central question in line: how do we move forward so that we’re not just looking for the bare minimum and actually exercise bodily autonomy?
The age-old question of engaging or not in UN convenings to hold a semantic line – that does not speak to the complexity of our realities as it did 30 years ago– popped up again this year. This time it was different because participating in a UN convening with the knowledge of the Israeli genocide crushing the souls of Palestinans in Gaza and the West Bank for months clouded over us. Especially in this CPD57, with Israel positioned as a member of the Bureau of the Commission meant that our analysis could not evade this complicity. It is particularly important to put this in perspective, because over the span of last year, some groups publicly protested and privately opposed Saudi Arabia chairing the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), based on its shameful track record on women’s and human rights. Yet there was no slight aversion to Israel’s participation in CPD57 while it has been maiming and killing people and advancing its occupation. And those who survive are starved to death or are made disabled, for Gaza is now host to the highest concentration of amputee children.
The yay for Israel and the nay for Saudi Arabia is not just consistent with how international feminist and human rights organizations that engage with CSW and CPD map the world; of progressive champions and regressive oppositions. But also a divisive base for any motivated transnational organizing that accounts for feminists in the Global South in general and SWANA1 in particular.
Although the 30th anniversary of the ICPD Program of Action was a landmark for sexual and reproductive health and rights advocacy, we noticed a weak participation of young people from the Global South in this year’s session. This year too, we held our Feminist Community of Care (FemCom), which is a space in which younger Global South feminists and newcomers to the space can come together to think, debrief and analyze how the multilateral spaces at the UN are and can be used to position the sexual and reproductive rights agenda back home. The first gathering was in person in New York, where we reflected on what was missing from the collective geopolitical analysis, how Palestine was a big elephant in the room which states and feminists decided to overlook, except for Algeria’s intervention. Our discussions ventured to anti-gender mobilizations at the grassroots and at CPD57.
It has also been a peak year for democracy and elections around the world, and worsening economies because of inflation, climate crises, debt crises, and wars in many corners around the world. Pushing for sexual and reproductive rights in such contexts can be impossible if such a struggle is divorced from people’s material conditions. And this tension is not resolved by marrying SRHR to other struggles on a semantic level, as we previously saw in CSW and CPD sessions in 2023 and 2022. As feminists actively engaging with these platforms, we have to live by the words of Audre Lorde that everyone likes to recite at the beginning of their intervention as a checkbox for ‘intersectionality’. “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.”
In the context of CPD57, imposing false binaries such as progressive vs opposition when it comes to SRHR, we are doing ourselves a disservice as feminists to our movements and to our communities of belonging. Continuing on the same path of advocacy for sexual and reproductive rights will only further alienate us from our people and communities. This is not the first time that we notice how we all — ourselves included — speak like state representatives, another symptom of the institutionalization of our movements. We speak in a way that requires lingo/jargon interpretation. It is no longer a “UN language” barrier, it has become disconnected from people’s demands such as free and universal healthcare and education, and above all very cryptic. We understand and find it difficult to accept that feminists are not organizing as a bloc that pushes for a language that is reflective of our realities instead of going orthodox with “agreed language” under the guise of pragmatism, professionalism, or diplomatic relations. We should not twist our tongues to fit with neoliberal capitalism, which we are enabling in those negotiation rooms and in those semantic fights. Instead, we should push furiously to cancel sovereign debt because it is central to enabling sexual and reproductive rights.
We held another FemCom gathering online to celebrate 30 years of the Reproductive Justice movement. We used the space to reflect on how we interpret and use the reproductive justice framework today as feminists from the Global South. We had two questions in mind: Where did we leave bodily autonomy in all of this? How did we let it slide right off our hands in exchange for some empty words in a document?
Human rights, including sexual and reproductive rights are indivisible. However, when we as feminists keep on compartmentalizing them in platforms such as CPD, we lose sight of the bigger picture that is not defined by single issues or identity politics. Back to square one, the Reproductive Justice movement emerged because of Black US feminists’ conviction that they were being left out of the pro-choice movement in the US. In 1994, after meeting with feminists from the Global South in international fora, they articulated what constituted reproductive justice for them: the right to have children, the right not to have children and; the right to nurture the children we have in a safe and healthy environment. The
hyperfixation on the right not to have children, most of the time euphemized as “reproductive rights” by states and feminists, is systematically leaving out assisted reproductive technology, public financing, social protection, diverse and extended kinship, and carceral policies from the conversation and our priorities. Also completely ignores the environment, partly because “safe” is undermined by some progressive states as a proposed language in negotiations as its connotation threatens nuclear energy!
What line are we holding for our people?
During the 57th session, everyone was pushing to “hold the line” or that we must occupy spaces so that antirights movements do not fill the vacuum of our absence. Again, analyzing things in a binary way of “it’s either them, or us”. But we question whether there is a binary, and whether the global SRHR movement is in fact just one with the same principles and objectives. And why is capitalism not our enemy instead of states or certain players? The anti-rights groups are not just undermining sexual and reproductive rights, they are systematically impoverishing us.
Feminists tell us it was different in 1994 and 1995, but 30 years later there is no shared or global feminist agenda across movements. We must look at the breakdowns and how advocacy in these spaces has shifted, got heavily formalized and co-opted by Global North’s interests. And how funding and capitalism has divided us and prevented us from having deep political discussions among ourselves. In 1994, feminist leaders of the SRHR movement were working at grassroots levels. The advocacy that happened in the halls of the UN was informed by the realities of millions of people, and not how Member States preferred to be seen or positioned. Gains within the UN space were significant, translated into policies, laws, and services. Actually made a difference in our lives. Nevertheless, things have changed. They became more institutionalized, neoliberalism thrived, and the women’s rights movement became co-opted by the development framing under gender equality. What we see now is that leading becomes co-convening, and is occupied by INGOs who work primarily in the global advocacy sphere, so “wins” are calculated differently. Whereas, grassroots organizations have a hard time coming to these meetings and positioning the realities of their communities because of different barriers such as language, financing , and because some of them do not consider those spaces as important as their marketing claims.
The rooms, whether UN corridors or feminist organizing spaces and whether online or on ground, are filled with pre-made analysis that emphasizes the role of the North as the savior of our South. The one to champion our sexual and reproductive freedoms, not so much if we get to ask for reparations to finance pleasure (as in not living in constant destitution) or demand canceling debt! This packaged analysis overestimates the real life effects of what is discussed and written down in a declaration, and undermines the underlying structures of neoliberalism, colonialism, and capitalism that hinder the realization of bodily autonomy. We have lost focus and now it is time to question whether CPD and UN convenings are the Mecca of SRHR.
Over the years, after Cairo, the global SRHR movement became used to accepting dwindling “wins”. Our barometer of “wins” contained within the comfort in holding the line instead of advocating for radical change, addressing the root causes and structural barriers. We believe this may be because that was the intention all along: to promote the institutionalization of our movements to make us believe that we’re promoting change when, in fact, we’re not. As we say in Mexico, nos dieron atole con el dedo2. We question if that line is enough now? Was it ever enough? Keeping that line is not without effect and it serves a specific agenda that upholds the division of the “developed vs. developing” countries that allows for extractivism, colonialism, fundamentalism, and control using financing as a means, only to serve corporate and colonial interests. And also perpetuating those power moves even inside our movement, where organizations also do extractive, colonial logics as a way to disempower others.
Expecting us, as feminists from the Global South, to hold that line — with the same analysis that was made in 1994 and has further disconnected from reality — without challenging what it means, is adding insult to the injury. The world has shifted, for example, technological advancements and data were not captured in the yellowing pages of Cairo Programme of Action. Holding the line is not enough; computers were an innovation back then!
Our understanding of the issues has changed too. We live in a world where more and more crises are happening at the same time. Capitalism forces us to power through a precarious reality every day. And somehow we are directed not to obviate the structures; for bluntness threatens agreed language.
When we categorize states as enemies we maintain a status quo, based solely on how they vote and not critically engage with why they vote the way they do, and whether their position comes from a legitimate opposition to imperialism and neocolonialism, or whether they use sovereignty as a caveat to animate their ideology. One that has for decades legitimized the exploitation of the people in the Global South. How can autonomy be achieved when the feminist movement immediately makes enemies with countries -in their abstract- exercising national sovereignty? How can we achieve bodily autonomy when countries such as the Netherlands, US, and Germany that are financing genocide in Palestine are being called champions of sexual and reproductive rights? This genocide is wiping out families en masse, demolishing infrastructure, normalizing ecocide, and getting us used to consuming losing limbs on livestream.
This is our call-in to come together and be critical not only of the co-optation of the UN spaces, and the countless failures of multilateralism today, but also of a feminist organizing that dilutes bodily autonomy to keep a word on paper. Perhaps we need to acknowledge the harms inflicted by the closer proximity to Member States and abandonment of people’s popular demands. To take things by the root, perhaps we need a common agenda for liberation from capitalism and neoliberalism. To envision how, why, and for whom we are advocating beyond organizational priorities in these spaces.
- SWANA refers to South West Asia and North Africa, an emerging articulation of 23 states, including Western Sahara* (occupied by Morocco), Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Egypt, Palestine**(occupied by Israel), Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Yemen, Djibouti.
- Dar atole con el dedo literally translates to fool someone by feeding some atole (a traditional Mexican hot beverage) only with a finger. It means to deceive someone by feeding them or giving them something in a small amount when they could have the whole cup.