Abstract
Article 12 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women carries the specific promise to eliminate all forms of discrimination against women in the field of health care. Written in 1999, General Recommendation 24 (GR 24) interprets this article within a particular gender equality paradigm that over time has been subject to critique and that today invites a rewriting. We pursue this project by engaging with the sex and gender essentialism of GR 24 to rework the category of “women” under Article 12, and to thereby rewrite what it means to “eliminate discrimination against women” in health care “on a basis of equality of men and women.” We then turn to the neglect of the political economy of health and its institutions in GR 24 to rewrite what it means to eliminate discrimination against women “in the field of health care” to ensure “access to health care services.” In this interpretation of Article 12, we reimagine sex and gender from the experiences of those who live them and seek to recreate the institutional structures of state and economy from the lives of those who experience them. We thus pivot away from a traditional alliance between the right to health and the fields of medicine and public health, which has tended to isolate health from other public goods in economic and social life and frame the field of health care as a site for the building of gender-just societies. In this radical rewriting of GR 24, we reimagine the political form and function of general recommendations in international human rights law, and in that political vision, we propose text for a future general recommendation on gender equality in health care under Article 12 of CEDAW.
Keywords:
Healthcare; General Recommendation 24; Feminist Rewiriting; Political Economy; Gender Justice