Around the world, policymakers and civil society are debating how economic and trade policies shape public health. This edited collection adds a new dimension to this debate. It synthesizes research from a variety of disciplines to analyse how the liberalization of international trade affects reproductive health and rights. Case studies from Mexico, Sri Lanka, China, Vietnam, Bangladesh, and Egypt illuminate how trade-related changes in women’s employment influence their reproductive needs and capacities. The book demonstrates how global and national trade policies affect the quality, quantity, and cost of reproductive health services. Contributors also explore the implications of the World Trade Organization and the various trade agreements under its purview for reproductive health services and rights. Ultimately, this collection addresses the key policy issues for advocates of both reproductive health and rights and economic justice, and shows how trade agreements weighted against the poor in the South have very specific gendered consequences. This book is aimed at an inter-disciplinary audience of economists, public health professionals, demographers, sociologists, anthropologists, and women’s studies specialists. It will also be of interest to policymakers and representatives of civil society organizations working on health, economic justice, and employment issues.

Global Prescriptions is a critical yet optimistic analysis of the role of transnational women's groups in setting the agendas for women's health in international and national settings. The book reviews a decade of women's participation in UN conferences, transnational networks, national advocacy efforts and sexual and reproductive health provision, assessing both their strengths and weaknesses. It critiques the Cairo, Beijing and Copenhagen conference documents and World Bank, WHO and health sector reform policies. It also offers case studies of national-level reform and advocacy efforts and appraises the controversy concerning TRIPS, trade, and essential AIDS drugs. The author takes into account the formidable political and ideological forces confronting global justice movements and also offers a sobering reassessment of transnational women's NGOs themselves and such problems as 'NGOization', fragmentation and donor-dependency. Petchesky argues that the power of women's transnational coalitions is only as great as their organic connection with grassroots social movements.

Women need their own health reference source. Research into gender-specific medicine — particularly identifying the ways in which diseases and their treatment affect men and women differently — has gainedground in the past 25 years. While this information is familiar to the medical community, much of it is unknown to the layperson. For example, more women than men die of cardiovascular disease every year, possibly because their symptoms are not recognized. Organized by body system, each chapter starts out with an explanation of how that system works and ways to maintain healthy function through diet, exercise, and other self-help measures. This is followed by an explanation of some of the medical conditions affecting that particular system and how they should be treated — in women, not men. Highly regarded as a women''s health expert and advocate; as a physician educator and as a media commentator, Dr. Moore is the Founder and President of DrDonnica.com, a popular women’s health information website launched in Sept. 2000. She is also Founder and President of Sapphire Women’s Health Group LLC, a multimedia women’s health education and communications firm. Team-written by female specialists in the US and UK, all of whom are experts intheir respective fields.

This books examines whether public service liberalization poses a threat to gender and human rights?

Numerous issues confront women's healthcare today, among them the medicalization of women's bodies, cosmetic genital surgery, violence against women, HIV, perinatal mental health disorders. This volume uniquely explores such difficult topics and others at the intersection of clinical practice, policy, and bioethics in women's health care through a feminist ethics lens. With in-depth discussions of issues in women's reproductive health, it also broadens scholarship by responding to a wider array of ethical challenges that many women experience in accessing health care. Contributions touch on many themes previously tackled by feminist ethics, but in new, contemporary ways. Some chapters expand into new fields in the bioethics literature, such as the ethical issues related to the care of Indigenous women, uninsured refugees and immigrants, women engaged in sex work, and those with HIV at different life stages and perinatal mental health disorders. Authors seek to connect theory and practice with users of the health system by including women's voices in their research. Bringing to bear their experience in active clinical practice in medicine, nursing, and ethics, the authors contemplate new conceptual approaches to important issues in women's healthcare, and make ethical practice recommendations for those grappling with these issues. Topical and up-to-date, this book provides a valuable resource for physicians, nurses, clinical ethicists, and researchers working in some of the most critical areas of women's health and applied ethics today.

This book focuses on reproductive health rights and assisted reproductive technologies (ART) in sub-Saharan Africa. Each chapter is connected to the other by focusing on different aspects of ART as a means of achieving conception. Topics such as regulation of ART practices, surrogacy and specific aspects of ART, which are gradually becoming acceptable but largely unregulated in Africa, promises to be of interest to scholars, researchers and fertility practitioners. Research in the book take a rights based approach and ethical analysis of ART practice in sub-Saharan Africa by authors from diverse backgrounds bringing together law and society perspectives. Readers stand to gain new knowledge on the societal, legal, medical and psychological requirements, effects and challenges of reproductive health rights and ART in the African context. The book is also relevant to UN Sustainable Development Goal 3: Good Health and Well-being, given that it promotes and advocates for access to reproductive healthcare for persons who have difficulty or are unable to conceive without medical assistance.

Recent history has witnessed a revolution in womens health care. Beginning in the late 1960s, women in communities across the United States challenged medical and male control over womens health. Few people today realize the extent to which these grassroots efforts shifted power and responsibility from the medical establishment into womens hands as health care consumers, providers, and advocates. Into Our Own Hands traces the womens health care movement in the United States. Richly documented, this study is based on more than a decade of research, including interviews with leading activists; documentary material from feminist health clinics and advocacy organizations; a survey of womens health movement organizations in the early 1990s; and ethnographic fieldwork. Sandra Morgen focuses on the clinics born from this movement, as well as how the movements encounters with organized medicine, the state, and ascendant neoconservative and neoliberal political forces of the 1970s to the1980s shaped the confrontations and accomplishments in womens health care. The book also explores the impact of political struggles over race and class within the movement organizations.