title: Sound and Fury--engaging with the politics and the law of sexual rights.
abstract: Although past resistance to sexual rights in global debates has often been grounded in claims to culture, nation and religion, opposition voices are now using, rather than rejecting, the frame of international human rights. This Commentary argues that, despite opponents' attempts to defeat sexual rights with other rights claims, a careful understanding of the principles of international human rights and its legal development exposes how the use of rights to oppose sexual rights should, and will ultimately, fail. The Commentary briefly takes up three kinds of "rights" claims made by opponents of sexual rights: limiting rights to protect rights, textual basis, and universality, and explores the rationales and impact of their application to countering sexual rights. Because sexuality and reproduction intersect as well as diverge in the opposition they face, this struggle matters intensely and plays out across advocacy, programmatic and policy worlds. Underpinning this Commentary is the understanding that opposition to sexual and reproductive health rights uses common arguments about rights principles that must be understood in order to be countered.
authors.affiliation: Co-Director, Global Health Justice Partnership of the Yale Law School and the School of Public Health, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA. Electronic address: alice.miller@yale.edu.
authors.forename: Alice M
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Miller
authors.affiliation: Professor of Preventive Medicine, Keck School of Medicine; Professor of Law and Preventive Medicine, Gould School of Law; Director, Program on Global Health and Human Rights, Institute for Global Health, University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles, CA, USA.
authors.forename: Sofia
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Gruskin
authors.affiliation: Independent consultant, Geneva, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Jane
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Cottingham
authors.affiliation: International Human Rights Lawyer on Sexuality, Gender, Sexual and Reproductive Health and Human Rights, Visiting Fellow, Global Health Justice Partnership of the Yale Law School and the School of Public Health, Yale Law School, New Haven, CT, USA.
authors.forename: Eszter
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Kismödi
mesh_terms: D006806:Human Rights / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence*; D006801:Humans; D011057:Politics; D060728:Reproductive Health; D046269:Reproductive Rights / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence; D012725:Sexual Behavior; D019529:Sexuality
keywords: legitimizing sexual rights; methods and politics of legal development; rights in conflict; sexual rights; universality