An international human rights lawyer discussed Wednesday night the socioeconomic and sociocultural obstacles to the U.N. Millennium Development Goal of reducing maternal mortality by 75 percent by 2015.
Rebecca Cook, faculty chair in international human rights and co-director of the International Program on Reproductive and Sexual Health Law at the University of Toronto, spoke to an audience of about a hundred people at the Nasher Museum of Art as part of the Boyarsky Lecture in Law, Medicine and Ethics.
Focusing on global perspectives of women's health and social justice, Cook characterized repressive gender customs and social laws as a modern-day inquisition.
"We need to recognize the female moral agency, which goes one step further than autonomy, to achieve self-determination," she said.
Identification of underlying socioeconomic and sociocultural factors that condition women's vulnerability is critical, Cook added.
Cook compared the opposition to emergency contraception to historical resistance-both religious and moral-to scientific discoveries.
A woman's right to get health care according to her own conscience is often ignored, Cook said.
Countries that require parental and spousal authorization for health provisions, such as birth control pills, render economically dependent women powerless, she said.
"Women's bodies are used instrumentally by societies," Cook said.
In many cultures, marriages are business transactions and virginity codes require women-but not men-to remain virgins until marriage in order to "ensure the goods are untainted," Cook added.
She said that forced continuation of pregnancy occurs in many places around the world, calling to mind the Nazi practice of prohibiting abortions for racially superior women.
Women's wishes are often neglected by state policies in a form of discrimination, leading to female stereotypes, especially regarding the natural role of women as mothers, she said.
Reducing motherhood to a natural state restricts women's options and also makes light of the amount of work that motherhood entails, Cook said.
The future goal lies in enhancing women's moral agency and increasing the understanding of the conditions that underlie female vulnerability in developing nations, Cook said.
She added that better mapping of social values and thinking strategically about how to change them for the better are also necessary.
The Boyarsky Lecture opened the upcoming conference-Maternal Birth Trauma in the Developing World: An International Workshop on Ethical Issues in Obstetric Fistula. Obstetric fistula, a severe medical condition, often causes the death of an unborn baby and devastating pain for the mother.
The conference-which aims to develop ethical standards for obstetric fistula treatment-will take place at the Searle Center during the next two days.
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