Voluntary Family Planning Programs That Respect, Protect, and Fulfill Human Rights

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 use respect, protect, and fulfill human rights in the way they are designed, implemented, and evaluated?” The framework defines what such a program looks like, taking into consideration the broad context in which programs operate as well as the essential programmatic elements at the policy, service, community, and individual levels. By applying human rights laws and principles to family planning program and quality of care frameworks, this new framework brings what have traditionally been parallel lines of thought together in one construct to make the issue of rights in family planning concrete. The framework also shows that taking a human rights-based approach and a public health-based approach can be mutually reinforcing if programming is based on reaching both public health and human rights outcomes.