Women's Health Care

Women's Health Care and Reproductive Rights Program

The Saratoga Foundation for Women Worldwide works to ensure the preservation of a woman’s right to control her reproductive choices, and advocates the institution of this right in countries where women are currently denied freedom. We conduct major research projects to identify the status of women’s reproductive choice in various countries, which includes information about reproductive technologies and genetic engineering and its consequences, from a woman’s human rights perspective. This work forecasts socio-economic assessments of developments in the biotechnology industry.

Health care embraces every aspect of our lives. Without adequate, quality and affordable health care, women cannot work, obtain an education or raise families. A universal health care system which incorporates cultural and gender related data into the health care delivery network is crucial in every country.

A significant portion of the health care services which women obtain and require pertain to family planning services. In the U.S. alone, women spend 10% or more of their income on out-of-pocket health care costs, 68% more than men. Contraceptive expense represents a high percentage of this additional cost. Contraception, pregnancy termination and tubal ligations are options for women in some countries. However, in nations where it is legal to obtain these services, religious crusades labor to establish roadblocks to the delivery of this care with the ultimate goal of eliminating a women’s right to make her personal reproductive decisions. In nations where these rights do not exist at all, culture and local custom deny women human rights afforded to men in the same society.

In the U.S. and in countries facing similar health care crises, comprehensive, affordable, quality health care which includes access to pregnancy prevention and termination, a patient’s bill of rights and remedies, access to alternative health services, prevention of insurance or employer mandated genetic testing and discrimination based on such tests, are key components to ensure that women, and their families, live healthy lives.

The Women’s Health care and Reproductive Rights Program focuses on four major issues:

• women’s human right to control reproductive decision making;
• international development of reproductive technologies and medicine, including new contraceptive technologies marketed worldwide;
• population control programs administered in Third World developing nations and their effect on women’s democratic and human rights;
• and the availability of health care for women worldwide.

Study of laws and legislation which criminalize pregnant women’s behavior is conducted. Examination of women are often the subjects of experimental reproductive technologies is underway, as well as the study of the marginalization of women due to commercial control of reproductive technologies. Institutional impediments to the right of women to choose whether and when to have children is examined throughout the world, cultural factors and biases exposed, restriction of international family planning services and recommendations are made for human rights growth in this area.

International research is conducted on women’s access to quality health care and the impediments to obtaining health care in countries around the globe. The Saratoga Foundation for Women Worldwide works to empower women to more effectively participate in the formulation of policy to guide new technology, including applications in medicine, agriculture, pharmaceuticals, artificial reproduction, and genetic engineering.