The Reproductive Rights of Adolescents: A Tool for Health and Empowerment

This paper outlines the general framework of adolescents' reproductive and sexual rights. It focuses on sexuality education, access to confidential health care, child marriage and lack of educational opportunity, sexual violence, and female genital mutilation. The authors list recommendations about how governments, youth advocates, and health care providers can help ensure that adolescents have the ability to make and act on informed reproductive decisions.

From the Introduction: "Advocating for adolescents’ reproductive rights can be challenging. Despite the critical health issues at stake, discussing the sexuality of young persons typically sparks controversy. A further challenge for advocates is confronting and refuting the assertion of culture as a justification and a defense for adolescents’ rights violations. When adolescence intersects with other factors, such as poverty, race, and gender, it compounds the challenges young women face in exercising their basic human rights.

This briefing paper outlines the general framework of adolescents’ reproductive and sexual rights. It addresses core concerns for adolescents’ rights and discusses governments’ legal duties to address those concerns. The areas of focus are sexuality education; access to confidential health care; child marriage and lack of educational opportunity; sexual violence; and female genital mutilation (FGM). Promoting adolescent health and autonomy should be the primary goals for advocates and lawmakers. Because adolescents do not fit within the traditional categories of child or adult, they require particular legal consideration. An effective government response includes creating and implementing laws and policies that enable adolescents to flourish and achieve their full potential."

The document presents the role of advocacy and lists the human rights standards that apply to adolescent reproductive rights (on page 4 of the document), followed by a more detailed discussion of core issues and approaches. The following are the recommendations that conclude the document:

"For Governments:

• Ensure adolescents’ access to needed health care services and education. This requires governments to allocate resources to youth-friendly clinics that offer comprehensive and confidential reproductive health care. In addition, they should provide financial and political support to comprehensive sex-education campaigns.
• Adopt and enforce legal measures and employ outreach strategies to protect adolescents’ rights. Governments should adopt legislation to ban child marriage and FGM and engage in public education campaigns and other activities to discourage these practices. They should explicitly criminalize sexual harassment and abuse in institutions meant to empower adolescents, such as schools, legal clinics, and the domestic arena.
• Empower married and pregnant adolescents. Ensure married adolescents’ access to educational and job training opportunities. Prohibit the expulsion of pregnant adolescents from school.
• Raise public awareness of adolescents’ rights. Adopt policies reflecting the government’s recognition of the rights of adolescents in the area of sexual and reproductive health. Engage in public education campaigns to raise awareness of adolescents’ rights and foster sensitivity to the reproductive health concerns of adolescents.

For Advocates:

• Utilize international human rights instruments to build and strengthen legal standards that recognize and safeguard adolescents’ rights. Use international instruments to encourage governments to respect, protect, and fulfill adolescents’ reproductive rights and to seek accountability for violations. To this end, submit shadow reports to U.N. [United Nations] treaty monitoring bodies and send communications to U.N. and regional special rapporteurs covering issues of health and violence against women and girls. Bring cases on behalf of individual victims of rights violations to national, regional, and U.N. human rights accountability bodies.
• Apply political pressure to governments that lack the legal framework and enforcement capacity to protect adolescents from violence, child marriage, and female genital mutilation.
• In all regional and international human rights norm-setting conferences, emphasize reproductive health of adolescents as a key human rights concern.

For HealthCare Providers:

• Ensure that health facilities are youth-friendly and provide confidential, comprehensive services. Facilities should be staffed with specially trained health care providers who can listen without judgement and empower adolescents to make safe choices regarding their reproductive health. Providers should be trained to understand adolescents’ reproductive rights and their capacity to make health care decisions.
• Provide adolescents who seek reproductive health care with information about their rights as patients. For example, adolescents should be made aware of their right to give informed consent and should know about administrative and legal remedies available to them should they experience violations of their rights.
• Provide adolescents with comprehensive information regarding pregnancy and the transmission of STIs [sexually transmitted infections].
• Censure health care providers who perform FGM.
• Ensure that providers are able to offer care to address complications of FGM."