Birthing Models on the Human Rights Frontier
Our book traces the major highlights of the history of Human Rights, the world's women's conferences and how reproductive rights activists have graduated from disenfranchised social movements in the 1960s and 1970s to adopting Human Rights platforms to create change. It follows with 16 chapters from Europe and North America to Africa, China, and Afghanistan written by birth and community activists changing their world.
Greta Thunberg, climate activist, joining with Jane Goodall at the World Economic Forum in Davos 2020.
Birthing Models on the Human Rights Frontier has been picked up by universities across the USA and Canada but is a primer for activists from multiple spheres as it starts with the premise that all colonialists dreams, like the American Dream, were unfortunately based on 6 human rights violations and all of the major social movements of the last 70 years have been an attempt to dismantle them:
Genocide: The Indigenous rights’ movements (Standing Rock, Idle No More) and the anti-eugenics movements concerned about systematic extermination or sterilization of people of certain races or with disabilities;
Slavery: The anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, the civil rights movement in the US, and Black Lives Matter; the movement against present-day human trafficking.
Patriarchy: The feminist, LGBTQI2S, #Me Too, sexual and reproductive rights issues, and humanization of childbirth movements.
Violence: The peace movement, the gun control movement in the US and the movement to help child soldiers in Africa; the strong reactions to rape in India, and movements against obstetric violence and searching for humanized birth.
Misappropriation of land and resources leading to classism: The anti-globalization movement; the fair trade movement; the “occupy” movement and the spotlight on the 1%; the anti-poverty movement.
Environmental and non-human species devastation: The “green” ecology movements and those focused on climate disruption.
The first four issues focus in particular on dehumanization processes and the responses of social movements to address human rights’ violations. Every chapter in the book calls for de-colononizing and rehumanizing childbirth while addressing elements of most of the other six issues. (Page 7 Birthing Models on the Human Rights Frontier)
Our epiphany about using the human rights platform to change the world occurred during Betty-Anne's long battle to reinstate vaginal breech since women were robbed of it in 2000 (see breech section) and during the Human Rights in Childbirth conference in Den Hague in 2012. In the photo above are Elizabeth Prochaska, UK human rights lawyer and founder of Birthrights UK of Human Rights; Stefania Kapronczay, Hungarian human rights lawyer who represented Anna Ternovsky before the European Court and won Anna's right to have a home birth in Hungary based on the issue of privacy--a new strategy--and Anna herself , all speaking at the Human Rights in Childbirth Conference in 2012.
