Global Human Rights and Reproductive Health

The language of global public health is the language of human rights. In the area of reproductive rights, human rights provide women and children, especially pregnant women, with special rights because governments have special obligations toward women and their health, especially the obligation to address and decrease maternal mortality. Just what these obligations are, how they can be made more salient and enforced, and why they do not (yet?) include the right to abortion, and how they affect the new reproductive technologies (including ova "donation" and stem cell research) will be discussed in the context of an increasingly globalized and interdependent world.