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‘Adolescent’ Sexual and Reproductive Health: Controversies, Rights, and Justice

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International Handbook on Adolescent Health and Development

Abstract

Adolescent sexual and reproductive health (SRH) is a field beset with a number of controversies, e.g. whether and to what kind of sexuality education young people should be exposed and whether teenagers should be able to decide on abortion without parental consent. It is within these controversies as well as local social dynamics that public SRH interventions aimed at adolescents take place. I start this chapter with an outline of the major global public health approach to adolescent SRH: the health and human rights framework. I then briefly overview some of the key issues concerning sexuality education, contraception, pregnancy, abortion, HIV, and lesbian, gay, bisexual (LGB) issues among adolescents, concentrating on questions surrounding taken-for-granted assumptions and health injustices. With this as a backdrop, I argue for a sexual and reproductive justice approach that draws from transnational feminism. Such an approach would focus on health injustices, analyze gendered power relations that cohere around sexuality and reproduction among adolescents, highlight the intersectionality of race, class, location, religion, ability and sexual orientation in health outcomes, and deconstruct normative frameworks and taken-for-granted assumptions.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I have placed ‘adolescents’ in scare quotes in this first instance of use in recognition of the historical contingency and socially constructed nature of the social category of ‘adolescence’. How ‘adolescence’ is conceptualized has significant implications for how sexual and reproductive issues among young people are understood and how interventions are designed (for further discussion, see Macleod 2011). For ease of reading, however, I do not persist in the use of scare quotes. I ask the reader to understand that I deploy the term in a deconstructed form, that is I simultaneously recognize the construction of the category as a social ‘reality’ and problematize it as necessarily fundamental to human development.

  2. 2.

    I concentrate here on LGB issues on the basis of their speaking to sexual orientation directly. Transgender, transsexual, and intersex issues, while important, speak more to gender diversity which is not the focus of this chapter.

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Acknowledgments

This work is based on research supported by the South African Research Chairs initiative of the Department of Science and Technology and National Research Foundation of South Africa, Grant Number 87582. Thank you to Kim Barker who commented on an earlier version of the paper.

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  1. Critical Studies in Sexualities and Reproduction, Psychology Department, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa

    Catriona Ida Macleod

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  1. School of Social Work, University of Oklahoma, Medicaid Endowed Professor of Mental Health Emeritus, Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA

    Andrew L. Cherry

  2. Hellerup, Denmark

    Valentina Baltag

  3. School of Work, University of Central Florida, Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA

    Mary E. Dillon

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Macleod, C.I. (2017). ‘Adolescent’ Sexual and Reproductive Health: Controversies, Rights, and Justice. In: Cherry, A., Baltag, V., Dillon, M. (eds) International Handbook on Adolescent Health and Development. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40743-2_9

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