Exploring Maternal Health through a Rights-Based Approach: Examples from Timor Leste

Abstract

This thesis explores maternal mortality and morbidity through a rights-based approach. It examines the case of Timor Leste, a young country in Southeast Asia that has experienced many human rights violations and is still currently experiencing a number of challenges to development, including high fertility and maternal mortality rates. The problem of maternal mortality and morbidity has been a tragic problem in a number of developing countries. The problem is that no matter how advanced the medical system has become, maternal mortality is still a major problem that is yet to be overcome. Now that the United Nations Human Rights council has recognized maternal mortality as a human rights issue, much focus has been placed in studying the problem through a rights based approach to see if this might speed the process of reducing the number of preventable maternal deaths as well as morbidity. However, many women in developing countries are still unaware of their rights and some do not even know the meaning of rights in the modern sense. This study also investigates the related issues of the collaboration of service providers/donors collaboration in improving maternal health; the need to clearly prioritise issues and challenges. This study finds that while collaboration is evident in Timor Leste, there are still some organizations that believe that collaboration and communication can be further increased to maximize the benefits of teamwork. If there is systematic collaboration between all the relevant government departments, local and international NGOs as well as all the multilateral and bilateral organizations then it will be easier to identify problems and assign responsibilities to all stakeholders. Moreover, this study found that the concept of rights is still not fully understood by women in Timor Leste, so key stakeholders also need to develop a strategy to inform and educate the whole population regarding the meaning of rights and how these can be achieved. At the same time, the health system in Timor Leste will need to be able to support and encourage women to exercise their rights without fear. This is more likely to be achieved when the government and key organizations develop a way to maximize efforts to work around or minimize issues and challenges, which in the case of Timor Leste are culture, tradition, lack of education and information, domestic violence, religion.