Promising but Elusive Engagements: Combining Human Rights and Public Health to Promote Women's Well-Being

This article recommends an exchange between the human rights and public health fields by abandoning the traditional characterizations of rights as individualistic and health collectivist. In the author's approach, laws and policy become essential elements of a health analysis while the need for trade-offs is recognized in a rights analysis. The author uses case studies of trafficking, gender-based violence, internally displaced persons, sexual orientation and maternal mortality to explore similarities and differences between the health and human rights fields. Four issues are examined: (1) the underlying philosophies, (2) goals and outlooks, (3) strategies and roles, and (4) methods. [Descriptors: Reproductive Rights - Safe Motherhood, International]