Studies in family planning
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Review Comparative Study
International human rights and women's reproductive health.
Neglect of women's reproductive health, perpetuated by law, is part of a larger, systematic discrimination against women. Laws obstruct women's access to reproductive health services. Laws protective of women's reproductive health are rarely or inadequately implemented. ⋯ Epidemiological evidence and feminist legal methods provide insight into the law's neglect of women's reproductive health and expose long-held beliefs in the law's neutrality that harm women fundamentally. Empirical evidence can be used to evaluate how effectively laws are implemented and whether alternative legal approaches exist that would provide greater protection of individual rights. International human rights treaties, including those discussed in this article, are being applied increasingly to expose how laws that obstruct women's access to reproductive health services violate their basic rights.
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In 1986, the Demographic and Health Surveys project administered the first six-year calendar history of events that included women's contraceptive use and their reasons for discontinuation in experimental surveys in Peru and the Dominican Republic. In this report the experimental survey from Peru is examined to demonstrate how the calendar data can be used to calculate multiple increment-decrement life table rates of contraceptive discontinuation--including contraceptive failure, method switching, and abandonment of use--and of resumption of method use following discontinuation. ⋯ Women who switch methods do so frequently, and many will return to a method used previously, or move on to a third method. Women who become pregnant after abandoning contraceptive use have similar contraceptive-use patterns to women who experience a contraceptive failure.