Women’s Status and Reproductive Health Rights

"This major study highlights intricately connected issues of socio-economic status and reproductive health rights of women in the four selected urban slums of Delhi metropolis, gender discrimination against girl children during their infancy and childhood in terms of accessibility to the basic needs of health care, nutrition, and education effects their physical and mental health, and thereby their income-generating capabilities and socio-economic status and impinges their reproductive health rights during their reproductive age span. The symptomatic profile of reproductive tract infections in the study highlights the incidence of obstetric and gynaecological morbidity amongst women in the slum settlements, which don’t have even basic hygienic and sanitational environmental facilities. The low status accorded to women in the Indian socio-cultural milieu and increasing misuse of amniocentesis for female foeticide, female infanticide, bride burning and dowry deaths are sufficient warnings for urgent policy interventions towards socioeconomic upliftment and political empowerment of women which would have both developmental and demographic ramifications and would facilitate achievement of developmental and demographic goals. Implicit in the study are several short-run and long-run policy implications of increasing women’s socio-economic status and ensuring their reproductive health rights in any traditional sociocultural society."