Dignity as non-discrimination: Existential protests and legal claim-making for reproductive rights

Analysing two reproductive rights claims brought before the High Court of Namibia and the European Court of Human Rights, this article argues that human dignity is not reducible to a recognized warrant (a right) to demand a particular set of goods, services, or treatments. Rather, dignity in the contexts in which women experience sterilization abuse would be better characterized as an existential protest against degradation, a protest that takes concrete form in legal demands for equal citizenship. Equality is conceived here as necessitating the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women in public and private life. The dignity as non-discrimination framework developed in the article thus integrates two of the leading interpretations of dignity in contemporary political philosophy - the existentialist approach that attends to the inward cry against degradation and the view of dignity as the equal, public status of democratic citizenship.