Women's health also relates to the appropriate status that a woman should enjoy, her right to assert and decide for herself the number of children she wants to have and the time she should have them, and her realization that what she ought to have and get are her basic human rights.
Since the technical discussions on women's health and development at the Forty-fifth World Health Assembly in 1992, WHO has advocated strongly for a lifespan approach to women's health—from conception to old age, from the time before birth to death, from the womb to the tomb.
Unfortunately, women have always been discriminated against. In most Asian countries, they have always been considered as subordinate to men. As young girls, they are under the tutelage of their fathers; as wives, they are considered to be under the authority of the husbands; and as widows, they become subject to the decisions of their eldest sons.
In some Western Pacific countries, particularly among the poor in the rural areas, the birth of a daughter is taken as the birth of another "slave", while the birth of a son is welcomed with great joy.
Again, in most developing countries, especially in the rural areas, women seem to have only two roles in life—to be wives and mothers. As such, they are conditioned by custom and society to believe that a woman's role is chiefly reproductive, which accounts for the fact that most girls in the countryside marry early, most of them while still in their teens, which translates into early pregnancies, more pregnancies, and higher maternal morbidity and mortality rates.