Human Rights: Achieving Reproductive Justice in our Schools and Beyond

In a recent interview, an employer asked me “what legal arguments can you make against states that accept federal funding for abstinence-only sexual education programs?” After a couple of “ums” and “wells” and “I uhs,” I had to accept temporary defeat. But I don’t go down that easily.  I’m willing to admit that my inability to articulate a satisfactory response to this question may be indicative of my legal ignorance. But it also indicates a lack of effective domestic legal tools to challenge federal efforts to curtail youths’ access to accurate information about their sexual and reproductive health.

 

As I thought harder about the question, I realized that while the civil rights delineated on our Constitution may not demand comprehensive sexuality education, various international human rights documents and directives do. Like the American Constitution, human rights law applies to state action. Unlike the Constitution, however, human rights law demands that nation states take affirmative steps to ensure that all persons have the means and conditions necessary to enjoy their rights.

Several treaties specifically support adolescents’ right to comprehensive information about sex and sexuality, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). The rights enshrined in these documents do not carry binding legal force in U.S. courts because Congress has not ratified them. However, many courts—including the Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas—have cited human rights documents and doctrine as persuasive authority.

Even though international human rights law has various applications to the domestic struggle for reproductive justice, most law students—past and present—have to go outside the classroom to learn about them.  Law Students for Reproductive Justice (LSRJ), a national nonprofit organization that supports law students around the country in their efforts to promote reproductive justice, is filling the gaps left by our coursework.   With resources like the new Human Rights Law Primer and Human Rights on the Home Front Easy Event in an Envelope, LSRJ provides the next generation of legal experts with the information and skills we will need to make reproductive rights a reality for all people.  With these tools, aspiring legal scholars and advocates like me can enter practice ready to articulate well-reasoned arguments that demand access to a full range of reproductive health services and induce government action to effectuate those rights. 

The work of the my generation of jurists is twofold: 1) infuse contemporary legal arguments with human rights doctrine to develop binding case law that relies on human rights principles, and 2) advocate for ratification of treaties like CEDAW and CRC at the local, state, and federal levels so that our government is responsible for ensuring that all individuals and communities have access to the information and services necessary to make meaningful choices about reproduction and sexual health.

To encourage scholarship by law students that applies a human rights framework to issues in reproductive justice, the theme of the 5th Annual Sarah Weddington Prize for New Student Scholarship in Reproductive Rights is “Reproductive Rights as Human Rights.” Such scholarship is essential to the success of the reproductive justice movement, and, more immediately, efforts to combat repeated federal attempts  to bribe states into delivering misinformation to our nation’s youth about sex, sexuality and reproductive health.