Ensuring Human Rights within Contraceptive Service Delivery

This paper presents a new conceptual framework, designed to serve as a pathway to fulfilling both the FP2020 goal and governments’ commitments to the provision of voluntary family planning programs that respect, protect, and fulfill human rights. The framework answers the key question, “How can we ensure public health programs oriented toward increasing voluntary family planning access and It is now well recognized that expanding access to contraceptive services and improving health outcomes require services to be delivered in ways that respect, protect and fulfl the human rights of everyone who seeks, or uses contraceptive information and services. WHO is committed to the mainstreaming of gender, equity and human rights, and also works to develop evidence-based norms, standards and tools for scaling up equitable access to quality care services within a rights- and gender-based framework. In 2014, to help guide its Member States, WHO published guidelines on Ensuring Human Rights in the Provision of Contraceptive Information and Services: Guidance and Recommendations. Developed according to WHO standards for guideline development, these guidelines provide 24 recommendations, grouped under nine headings that reflect human rights principles and standards, and their health and human rights rationales, based on available evidence. The guidelines do not provide details about implementation of the recommendations. This implementation guide for ensuring human rights within contraceptive service delivery is a companion document to the WHO guidelines. This implementation guide sets out core minimum actions that can be taken at different levels of the health system, and provides examples of implementation of the recommendations in the WHO guidelines. This implementation guide was developed using a rigorous methodology which included: identification of key considerations and action points for each of the WHO guidelines based on assessment and synthesis of evidence. An expert working group from UNFPA and WHO was identified, including country-level programming experts, to review and give inputs related to key considerations and key actions. Human rights and gender equality principles were systematically incorporated in the development of this guide.