Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters – What’s in a name?

RHM was launched in 1993, one year before the landmark International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo, at which “reproductive health” was defined for the first time in an international consensus document. Odd as it may seem from the standpoint of the early twentyfirst century, the term “reproductive health” was revolutionary at the time. It was a very conscious and political strategy on the part of women’s health activists, NGOs and others of a like mind, to introduce a new concept that countered “population control” programmes which had been fostered and heavily supported financially by development agencies for the three previous decades. Population programmes had brought family planning services to women in different parts of the world, but these programmes were often aggressive or even coercive, and they did nothing to address the fact that women also need access to safe abortion services, to maternal health services, to services for sexually transmitted infections and services for child health. Nor, indeed, did they address similar needs for men. The approach in these programmes was in no way informed by the understanding that family planning is just one piece of a complex picture in which sexuality and sexual health are intertwined with reproductive health and that they might also have something to do with pleasure, desires, and well-being. The first issue of Reproductive Health Matters in May 1993 (“Population and family planning policies: women-centred perspectives”) took head-on the question of population policies to explore whether a women-centred perspective was possible. The editor, Marge Berer, wrote: