The Reproductive Health Needs of Refugees and Displaced People: A Opening for Renewed U.S. Leadership

The mid-1990s marked the beginning of recognition at the global level that the reproductive health needs and rights of people affected by conflict and natural disasters are urgent and deserve a response. A groundbreaking report in 1994, Refugee Women and Reproductive Health Care: Reassessing Priorities, made the case for prioritizing these services and laid out the consequences of inaction. Consensus documents that emerged from the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development and 1995's Fourth World Conference on Women asserted that women living in crisis situations have the same right to reproductive health as all women do. And, multilateral agencies, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and country governments began to mobilize to develop specific sets of services and protocols to get reproductive health care to people in emergency situations. The United States was at the forefront of these efforts. The U.S. State Department continued to support programs and initiatives to increase access to reproductive health care to refugees and internally displaced people even after the arrival of the Bush administration in 2001, but to a lesser degree and with a much lower profile than previously. In 2003--following the extension of the Mexico City policy (also known as the global gag rule) to State Department programs and the cutoff of a U.S. contribution to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA)--the Bush administration abruptly terminated financial support for the Reproductive Health Response in Conflict (RHRC) Consortium.