Reproductive Health is in, Sexual Experience is out with the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

According to a BBC report yesterday, the UN General Assembly has finally agreed on a draft for the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and it will be open for signatures and ratification in March of 2007. This is good news considering in August, during the last round of talks on the document reports were coming out in the press sounding as if the process might get held up. But it’s not all good news.

Back in August I blogged about two of the passages that were causing some member states, including the U.S., some problems. They were both about sex. The first was a passage that stated that people with disabilities had the right to equal access to reproductive health services. The second was a statement that people with disabilities had the right to “experience their sexuality”. It’s true that both wordings are vague, but that’s the way it is with sex. No one is demanding that non-disabled people define what it means to “experience their sexuality” in order to have the right to do it.

In the final document, which can be accessed here, the reproductive text was left in, but the part about experiencing their sexuality was dropped.

What a complete indictment of the countries who opposed this wording (among them United States, Honduras, Egypt, Costa Rica, Bangladesh, Tanzania, Tunisia, Qatar, Kenya, the Philippines, and Norway, and 11 other countries). How any of these countries can claim to treat their citizens equally is beyond me (mind you, I don’t know if any of these countries actually do claim to treat their citizens equally).

Obviously I’m happy that reproductive services are in there, and the fact is that people living with disabilities always have, and always will have the right to experience their sexuality, as it isn’t something the State can ever take away, no matter how hard they try. At the same time it seems almost inconceivable that a country that throws words like freedom, individuality, democracy, and personal expression like they invented them, could so blatantly stomp on the basic human rights of more than 48 million of its citizens.