Who is the 'woman' in human rights law : narratives of women's bodies and sexuality in reproduction jurisprudence

Abstract

This thesis asks who is the woman in human rights law and explores how transnational human rights law forums are contributing to women’s silencing by reinforcing harmful stereotypes. It constructs a special analytical frame – a reproductive rights-based approach – to show the emerging narratives about women, their bodies and sexuality when jurisprudence concerning abortion, birth, reproductive violence and assisted reproduction is connected and read together. By using feminist approaches to law and understanding human rights through power relationships to analyse a total of 35 cases (between 2003-2017) from the European Court of Human Rights, the United Nations Human Rights Committee, the United Nations CEDAW Committee and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the thesis shows how despite good examples of anti-stereotyping done by courts or committees, by an large, women are still given fixed roles that are all primarily connected to the idea of women as mothers and women’s bodies as reproductive bodies. Thus, the human rights law forums are still not putting women’s lived experiences at the centre of their analysis and are not doing an effective listening work. Instead, there is still a resistance – especially in the European Court of Human Rights – against taking women’s lived realities, life plans and what they say about violence, suffering, disadvantages seriously.