From The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/world/joan-dunlop-dies-at-78-fought-for-womens-health-rights.html
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: June 30, 2012
Published: June 30, 2012
Joan
Dunlop, a global leader in addressing women’s issues who helped prod
the United Nations to define a woman’s right to say no to sex as an
essential human right, died on Friday at her home in Lakeville, Conn.
She was 78.
The cause was breast cancer, said her sister, Penelope West.
Ms.
Dunlop devoted herself to expanding women’s rights to control their own
bodies. The right to say no to a request for sex was endorsed as a
universal guideline by more than 180 nations at a conference in Beijing
in 1995. Ms. Dunlop lobbied the delegates as president of the
International Women’s Health Coalition, an advocacy group that supports
50 health projects in eight countries. She held the post from 1984 to
1998.
Her leadership in women’s issues grew from her involvement
in organizations dedicated to controlling population. She believed that
if women have better living standards and more independence, they will
be empowered to decide how many children they will bear.
“When we say population policy, people think family planning, and we’re saying it’s far more than that,” she said in 1994 in an interview with The New York Times.
That
year, she summoned 15 colleagues to London in advance of a United
Nations conference on population and development in Cairo. They wrote
the “Women’s Declaration on Population Policies,” a set of guidelines
that the United Nations ultimately adopted. It was the first
international agreement on population policy that made women’s rights a
central concern.
Ms. Dunlop had an illegal abortion
as a young woman in England, an experience that fueled her campaign to
improve women’s reproductive choices, she said. She was also angry at
the rise of the anti-abortion movement in the United States, which she
perceived as “an organizing tool” for conservatives promoting their
broader political agenda.
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