ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a critical assessment of this effort to use health rights litigation to advance safe motherhood based on our experiences as community-based lawyers working on the front lines. Activists globally have debated strategies to address maternal mortality and morbidity. Some leading academics and practitioners advocate a human rights approach to ensuring safe motherhood. The right to safe motherhood is based on a strong social and economic rights (SER) framework established by the Indian Constitution, later expanded by the Supreme Court. Despite constitutional provisions, international human rights obligations, and domestic policies and programs mandating the right to safe motherhood, pregnant women deliver on roads, under trees, and in unhygienic, overcrowded facilities, all too frequently resulting in fatal consequences. Grassroots organizations have begun to see safe motherhood through a health rights lens and are turning to litigation to bolster their advocacy efforts.
