Women and Children in Health Care

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Chikako Takeshita

The intrauterine device (IUD) is used by 150 million women around the world. It is the second most prevalent method of female fertility control in the global South and the third most prevalent in the global North. Over its five decades of use, the IUD has been viewed both as a means for women's reproductive autonomy and as coercive tool of state-imposed population control, as a convenient form of birth control on a par with the pill and as a threat to women's health. Takeshita investigates the development, marketing, and use of the IUD since the 1960s. She offers a biography of a multifaceted technological object through a feminist science studies lens, tracing the transformations of the scientific discourse around it over time and across different geographies. Takeshita describes how developers of the IUD adapted to different social interests in their research and how changing assumptions about race, class, and female sexuality often guided scientific inquiries. The IUD became a politically versatile technology, adaptable to both feminist and nonfeminist reproductive politics because of researchers attempts to maintain the device's suitability for women in both the developing and the developed world. Takeshita traces the evolution of scientists concerns, from contraceptive efficacy and product safety to the politics of abortion, and describes the most recent, hormone-releasing, menstruation-suppressing iteration of the IUD. Examining fifty years of IUD development and use, finds a microcosm of the global political economy of women's bodies, health, and sexuality in the history of this contraceptive device. From publisher description.

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Cheryl L. Meyer

Taking her title from an ancient Greek belief that women's health problems were caused by "a wandering uterus" that needed to be confined and controlled, Meyer exposes the way in which myths and prejudice about female sexuality continue to influence the practice of law and medicine. Suitable for undergraduate courses as well as for generally interested reader, this book offers new insights while providing a wealth of up-to-date information. The text follows the reproductive cycle on three main parts: Political Issues of Pre-Conception, the Politics of Pregnancy, and The Politics of Motherhood. Throughout, Meyer argues passionately that, while technology and medicine must progress, they should not be allowed to do so at women's expense.

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Vincent Fauveau

Contributed articles on history, achievements, and main lessons of the successive Maternal and Child Health and Family Planning programmes implemented in Matlab from 1975 till 1990.

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Michael Donnelly

In 1996 Major Donnelly was diagnosed with ALS, Lou Gehrig's Disease, at the unusually young age of 35; the onset of this illness marked the beginning of a kind of torture beyond the scope of even the most rigorous military survival training. Betrayed by his body, eventually paralyzed and confined to a wheel-chair, he experienced another betrayal perhaps even more difficult to comprehend - betrayal by his country. For despite the fact that over 110,000 Desert Storm veterans are sick, many dying of mysterious cancers and neurological diseases, including more than ten times the normal incidence of ALS - and despite all evidence pointing to U.S. troops having been dosed by low levels of Iraqi nerve agents and exposed to chemical weapons' fallout - the Pentagon adamantly denies any connection between their illnesses and their service in the Gulf War. A first step has been taken toward justice for the tens of thousands of Desert Storm veterans who are suffering virtually in isolation, many without any medical or disability benefits, thanks largely to the testimony of the author before the House of Representatives in 1997. Major Donnelly believes the truth will be uncovered by the studies recommended by the House, as well as through stories like his own, and he fervently hopes that America can, at last, "get it right."