Women's Reproductive Rights: a literary perspective

This paper examines the development of the concept of women’s reproductive rights in human rights treaties and conventions since the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, revealing how traditional human rights formulations are often male-centered and lack a gender-sensitive approach. Since feminist speculative fiction has anticipated many of the reproductive rights issues that we are facing today, the author claims that literary texts such as Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), P. D. James’s The Children of Men (1992) and Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army (2007) can enlighten contemporary debates on reproductive rights and contribute to the development of a universal ethics of human rights that takes into account the specificity of women’s rights.