In a recent interview, an employer asked me “what legal
arguments can you make against states that accept federal funding for
abstinence-only sexual education programs?” After a couple of “ums” and “wells”
and “I uhs,” I had to accept temporary defeat. But I don’t go down that
easily.  I’m willing to admit that
my inability to articulate a satisfactory response to this question may be
indicative of my legal ignorance. But it also indicates a lack of effective
domestic legal tools to challenge federal efforts to curtail youths’ access to
accurate information about their sexual and reproductive health.

As
I thought harder about the question, I realized that while the civil rights
delineated on our Constitution may not demand comprehensive sexuality
education, various international human rights documents and directives do. Like
the American
Constitution, human rights law applies to state action. Unlike the
Constitution, however, human rights law demands that nation states take
affirmative steps to ensure that all persons have the means and conditions
necessary to enjoy their rights.

Several
treaties specifically support adolescents’ right to comprehensive information
about sex and sexuality, including the Convention on the Rights of
the Child (CRC) and the Convention
on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).
The rights enshrined in these documents do not carry binding legal force in
U.S. courts because Congress has not ratified them. However, many
courts—including the Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas—have
cited human rights documents and doctrine as persuasive authority.

Even
though international
human rights law has various applications to the domestic struggle for
reproductive justice, most law students—past and present—have to go outside the
classroom to learn about them.  Law Students for Reproductive Justice (LSRJ), a
national nonprofit organization that supports law students around the country
in their efforts to promote reproductive justice, is filling the gaps left by
our coursework.   With resources like the new Human Rights Law Primer and Human
Rights on the Home Front Easy
Event in an Envelope, LSRJ provides the next generation of legal experts
with the information and skills we will need to make reproductive rights a
reality for all people.  With these
tools, aspiring legal scholars and advocates like me can enter practice ready
to articulate well-reasoned arguments that demand access to a full range of
reproductive health services and induce government action to effectuate those
rights. 

The
work of the my generation of jurists is twofold: 1) infuse contemporary legal
arguments with human rights doctrine to develop binding case law that relies on
human rights principles, and 2) advocate for ratification of treaties like
CEDAW and CRC at the local, state, and federal levels so that our government is
responsible for ensuring that all individuals and communities have access to
the information and services necessary to make meaningful choices about
reproduction and sexual health.

To encourage scholarship by law students that
applies a human rights framework to issues in reproductive justice, the theme
of the 5th Annual Sarah Weddington Prize for New Student
Scholarship in Reproductive Rights is “Reproductive Rights as Human Rights.” Such scholarship is essential to the success of the reproductive justice movement, and, more immediately, efforts
to combat repeated federal attempts  to bribe states into
delivering misinformation to our nation’s youth about sex, sexuality and
reproductive health.