Rebecca J. Cook - Böcker

The concept of reproductive health promises to play a crucial role in improving health care provision and legal protection for women around the world. This is an authoritative and much-needed introduction to and defence of the concept of reproductive health, which though internationally endorsed, is still contested. The authors are leading authorities on reproductive medicine, women's health, human rights, medical law, and bioethics. They integrate their disciplines to provide an accessible but comprehensive picture. They analyse 15 cases from different countries and cultures, and explore options for resolution. The aim is to equip readers to fashion solutions in their own health care circumstances, compatibly with ethical, legal and human rights principles.

The concept of reproductive health promises to play a crucial role in improving women's health and rights around the world. It was internationally endorsed by a United Nations conference in 1994, but remains controversial because of the challenge it presents to conservative agencies: it challenges policies of suppressing public discussion on human sexuality and regulating its private expressions. Reproductive Health and Human Rights is designed to equip healthcare providers and administrators to integrate ethical, legal, and human rights principles in protection and promotion of reproductive health, and to inform lawyers and women's health advocates about aspects of medicine and healthcare systems that affect reproduction.Rebecca Cook, Bernard Dickens, and Mahmoud Fathalla, leading international authorities on reproductive medicine, human rights, medical law, and bioethics, integrate their disciplines to provide an accessible but comprehensive introduction to reproductive and sexual health. They analyse fifteen case-studies of recurrent problems, focusing particularly on resource-poor settings. Approaches to resolution are considered at clinical and health system levels. They also consider kinds of social change that would relieve the underlying conditions of reproductive health dilemmas. Supporting the explanatory chapters and case-studies are extensive resources of epidemiological data, human rights documents, and research materials and websites on reproductive and sexual health. In explaining ethics, law, and human rights to healthcare providers and administrators, and reproductive health to lawyers and women's health advocates, the authors explore and illustrate limitations and dysfunctions of prevailing health systems and their legal regulation, but also propose opportunities for reform. They draw on the values and principles of ethics and human rights recognized in national and international legal systems, to guide healthcare providers and administrators, lawyers, governments, and national and international agencies and legal tribunals. Reproductive Health and Human Rights will be an invaluable resource for all those working to improve services and legal protection for women around the world. Updates to this book, and information on translations to French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese and Arabic are now available at www.law.utoronto.ca/faculty/cook/ReproductiveHealth.html

Rebecca J. Cook and the contributors to this volume seek to analyze how international human rights law applies specifically to women in various cultures worldwide, and to develop strategies to promote equitable application of human rights law at the international, regional, and domestic levels. Their essays present a compelling mixture of reports and case studies from various regions in the world, combined with scholarly assessments of international law as these rights specifically apply to women.

Drawing on domestic and international law, as well as on judgments given by courts and human rights treaty bodies, Gender Stereotyping offers perspectives on ways gender stereotypes might be eliminated through the transnational legal process in order to ensure women's equality and the full exercise of their human rights.A leading international framework for debates on the subject of stereotypes, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, was adopted in 1979 by the UN General Assembly and defines what constitutes discrimination against women. It also establishes an agenda to eliminate discrimination in all its forms in order to ensure substantive equality for women. Applying the Convention as the primary framework for analysis, this book provides essential strategies for eradicating gender stereotyping. Its proposed methodology requires naming operative gender stereotypes, identifying how they violate the human rights of women, and articulating states' obligations to eliminate and remedy these violations.According to Rebecca J. Cook and Simone Cusack, in order to abolish all forms of discrimination against women, priority needs to be given to the elimination of gender stereotypes. While stereotypes affect both men and women, they can have particularly egregious effects on women, often devaluing them and assigning them to subservient roles in society. As the legal perspectives offered in Gender Stereotyping demonstrate, treating women according to restrictive generalizations instead of their individual needs, abilities, and circumstances denies women their human rights and fundamental freedoms.

It is increasingly implausible to speak of a purely domestic abortion law, as the legal debates around the world draw on precedents and influences of different national and regional contexts. While the United States and Western Europe may have been the vanguard of abortion law reform in the latter half of the twentieth century, Central and South America are proving to be laboratories of thought and innovation in the twenty-first century, as are particular countries in Africa and Asia. Abortion Law in Transnational Perspective offers a fresh look at significant transnational legal developments in recent years, examining key judicial decisions, constitutional texts, and regulatory reforms of abortion law in order to envision ways ahead.The chapters investigate issues of access, rights, and justice, as well as social constructions of women, sexuality, and pregnancy, through different legal procedures and regimes. They address the promises and risks of using legal procedure to achieve reproductive justice from different national, regional, and international vantage points; how public and courtroom debates are framed within medical, religious, and human rights arguments; the meaning of different narratives that recur in abortion litigation and language; and how respect for women and prenatal life is expressed in various legal regimes. By exploring how legal actors advocate, regulate, and adjudicate the issue of abortion, this timely volume seeks to build on existing developments to bring about change of a larger order.Contributors: Luis Roberto Barroso, Paola Bergallo, Rebecca J. Cook, Bernard M. Dickens, Joanna N. Erdman, Lisa M. Kelly, Adriana LamačkovÁ, Julieta Lemaitre, Alejandro Madrazo, Charles G. Ngwena, Rachel RebouchÉ, Ruth Rubio-MarÍn, Sally Sheldon, Reva B. Siegel, VerÓnica Undurraga, Melissa Upreti.

In Frontiers of Gender Equality, editor Rebecca Cook enlarges the chorus of voices to introduce new and different discourses about the wrongs of gender discrimination and to explain the multiple dimensions of gender equality. This volume demonstrates that the wrongs of discrimination can best be understood from the perspective of the discriminated, and that gender discrimination persists and grows in new and different contexts, widening the gap between the principle of gender equality and its realization, particularly for subgroups of women and LGBTQ+ peoples.Frontiers of Gender Equality provides retrospective views of the struggles to eliminate gender discrimination in national courts and international human rights treaties. Focusing on gender equality enables comparisons and contrasts among these regimes to better understand how they reinforce gender equality norms. Different regional and international treaties are examined, those in the forefront of advancing gender equality, those that are promising but little known, and those whose focus includes economic, social, and cultural rights, to explore why some struggles were successful and others less so. The book illustrates how gender discrimination continues to be normalized and camouflaged, and how it intersects with other axes of subordination, such as indigeneity, religion, and poverty, to create new forms of intersectional discrimination.With the benefit of hindsight, the book's contributors reconstruct gender equalities in concrete situations. Given the increasingly porous exchanges between domestic and international law, various national, regional, and international decisions and texts are examined to determine how better to breathe life into equality from the perspectives, for instance, of Indigenous and Muslim women, those who were violated sexually and physically, and those needing access to necessary health care, including abortion. The conclusion suggests areas of future research, including how to translate the concept of intersectionality into normative and institutional settings, which will assist in promoting the goals of gender equality.