The Right’s Reasons: Constitutional Conflict and the Spread of Woman-Protective Anti-Abortion Argument

The Lecture offers a provisional first account of the rise and spread of WPAA. It traces the development of gender-based antiabortion advocacy, examining the rise of post-abortion syndrome (PAS) claims in the Reagan years and the first struggles in the antiabortion movement about whether the right to life is properly justified on the ground of women’s welfare. My story then follows changes in the abortion-harms-women claim, as it is transformed from PAS—a therapeutic and mobilizing discourse initially employed to dissuade women from having abortions and to recruit women to the antiabortion cause—into WPAA, a political discourse forged in the heat of movement conflict that seeks to persuade audiences outside the movement’s ranks in political campaigns and constitutional law. I tell a story in which social movement mobilization, coalition, and conflict each play a role in the evolution and spread of this constitutional argument, in the process forging new and distinctly modern ways to talk about the right to life and the role morality of motherhood in the therapeutic, public health, and political rights idiom of late twentieth-century America

Barren Lands and Barren Bodies In Navajo Nation: Indian Women WARN about Uranium, Genetics, and Sterilization

Founded by Native American women in 1974, Women of All Red Nations (WARN) insisted that the ongoing Indian public health crisis could not be properly understood exclusively within the context of the exploitation and pollution of the physical environment. It required as well an understanding of the larger context of Indian health issues evolving out of past and present cultural and political changes. This article focuses on selected health, threats affecting the Dine, or the People, as Navajo Indians call themselves, living in Dine Bikeyah (Navajo Nation) during the mid to late 20th century. Navajo history is marked by a series of catastrophes befalling the health of its people and lands, and reactions by both the Dine and the federal government. The 20th century Navajo story combines the concurrent tragedies of forced Indian sterilizations with the calamitous health consequences of uranium exploitation that continue into the 21st century. This context must not be ignored when assessing the difficulties involved in establishing a trusting relationship between the Navajo people and outside researchers and health care providers

How Factors like 1800’s Gender Expectations, Misconceptions, and Moral Traditions Shaped US Women’s Reproductive Medical Care

abstract: In the last 200 years, advancements in science and technology have made understanding female sexual function and the female body more feasible; however, many women throughout the US still lack fundamental understanding of the reproductive system in the twenty-first century. Many factors contribute to the lack of knowledge and misconceptions that women still have. Discussing sexual health tends to make some people uncomfortable and this study aims to investigate what aspects of somewhat recent US history in women’s health care may have led to that discomfort. This thesis examines the question: what are some of the factors that shaped women’s reproductive medicine in the US from the mid 1800s and throughout the 1900s and what influence could the past have had on how women and their physicians understand female sexuality in medicine and how physicians diagnose their female patients in the twenty-first century. A literature review of primary source medical texts written at the end of the 1800s provides insight about patterns among physicians at the time and their medical practice with female patients. Factors like gendered expectations in medical practice, misconceptions about the female body and behaviors, and issues of morality in sex medicine all contributed to women lacking understanding of sex female reproductive functions. Other factors like a physician’s role throughout history and non-medical reproductive health providers and solutions likely also influenced the reproductive medicine women received. Examining the patterns of the past provides some insight into some of the outdated and gendered practices still exhibited in healthcare. Expanding sexual education programs, encouraging discussion about sex and reproductive health, and checking gendered implicit bias in reproductive healthcare could help eliminate echoes of hysteria ideology in the twenty-first century medicine.Dissertation/ThesisMasters Thesis Biology 201

Do Health and Longevity Create Wealth?

Health, of course, is vital for productivity and quality of life, and it is understood that as society accumulates more wealth it can provide better health benefits for its people. But health as a driver of the economy is a relatively new concept within scholarly and economics studies. In recent years, many of the foremost schools of economic thought have come to recognize health as a critical driver of the economy

Overcoming the Legacy of Mistrust: African Americans’ Mistrust of Medical Profession

Recent studies show that racism still exists in the American medical profession, the fact of which legitimizes the historically long-legacy of mistrust towards medical profession and health authorities among African Americans. Thus, it was suspected that the participation of black patients in end-of-life care has always been significantly low stemmed primarily from their mistrust of the medical profession. On the other hand, much research finds that there are other reasons than the mistrust which makes African Americans feel reluctant to the end-of-life care, such as cultural-religious difference and genuine misunderstanding of the services. If so, two crucial questions are raised. One is how pervasive or significant the mistrust is, compared to the other factors, when they opt out of the end-of-life care. The other is if there is a remedy or solution to the seemingly broken relationship. While no studies available answer these questions, we have conducted an experiment to explore them. The research was performed at two Philadelphia hospitals of Mercy Health System, and the result shows that Black patients’ mistrust is not too great to overcome and that education can remove the epistemic obstacles as well as overcome the mistrust

'My Father’s Daughter': Filial Dislocation in Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Poetry

Drawing on the father figure and the father–daughter dynamic in Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s poetry, this article examines how the motif of filial dislocation underlines ambivalent and complicated emotions and meanings that can be traced back to the poet’s traumatic childhood experience of her father’s violence. This experience, described here as one of acute psychical and emotional rupture and dislocation, has been imprinted onto Lim’s body and consciousness in the form of embodied memories and emotions, and reenacted in writing and poetic articulation where the father figure is concerned. Through the recurring themes of memory, (dis)connection, distance, and dislocation, Lim’s deeply personal, even autobiographical, poems explore the wounded father–daughter relationship; in so doing, they trouble the ideological premise of filial piety as a cultural concept, which upholds the child’s obligation to the parent through the performance of filial care, respect, and obedience. At the same time, Lim’s poems reflect how embodied memories and emotions are relived and refelt in the process of writing as well as the depth of the poet’s emotional response and subjective interiority in the articulation and performance of filial and gender identity. Weaving through and traversing interior and exterior spaces and landscapes of memory and imagination, body and geography, the poems illuminate complex psychological, emotional, and embodied dimensions of Lim’s mediation of her filial and gender identity as a feminist poet, a daughter, and a gendered individual

Breast Cancer in Canada: Medical Response and Attitudes, 1900-1950

Most historiography concerning the treatment of breast cancer focuses on the radical mastectomy as the treatment of choice during the first half of the twentieth century. How frequently this surgery was actually used, however, has not been clearly determined. It was feasible only in cases that had been diagnosed early, and many women did not consult their doctors until their disease had progressed significantly. The debate among Canadian physicians, and others, regarding methods of treatment was accompanied by a similar debate over the best diagnostic method. Evidence is suggestive that Canadian physicians differed from their American counterparts in three areas: in not rigidly enforcing one-step surgery, in their willingness to use radium as an adjunct to surgery, and in their challenge to radical mastectomy. The discourse over treatment, diagnosis, and causes of breast cancer took place in a gendered context that involved the role of women in society as well as the function of their bodies.L’historiographie concernant le traitement du cancer du sein soutient la plupart du temps que les médecins privilégiaient la mastectomie radicale pour traiter ce cancer durant la première moitié du XXe siècle. On connaît cependant mal la fréquence de ce type d’intervention chirurgicale. Elle n’était possible qu’en cas de dépistage précoce et bon nombre de femmes ne consultaient leur médecin que longtemps après le début de la maladie. Le débat chez les médecins canadiens et des autres au sujet des méthodes de traitement se déroulait parallèlement à un débat semblable sur la meilleure méthode de diagnostic à employer. On sait que les médecins canadiens différaient d’opinion avec leurs homologues américains à trois égards : en ne pratiquant pas de manière rigide la chirurgie en une étape, en utilisant volontiers le radium comme traitement d’appoint à la chirurgie et en contestant la pratique de la mastectomie radicale. Ce discours sur le traitement, le diagnostic et les causes du cancer du sein se déroulait sur fond de débat touchant notamment le rôle des femmes dans la société et la fonction de leurs corps