Revolutionizing Women S Healthcare

Revolutionizing Women's Healthcare is the story of a feminist experiment: the self-help movement. Tired of doctors who saw them as silly little girls, shame over birth control, abortions in back alleys, and little control over their reproductive lives, feminists created the self-help movement. In an effort to revolutionize women's healthcare they founded clinics, created books and movies, raided medical institutions, performed abortions, and created national organizations.

In 1948, the Constitution of the World Health Organization declared, “Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” Yet this idea was not predominant in the United States immediately after World War II, especially when it came to women’s reproductive health. Both legal and medical institutions—and the male legislators and physicians who populated those institutions—reinforced women’s second class social status and restricted their ability to make their own choices about reproductive health care. In More Than Medicine, Jennifer Nelson reveals how feminists of the ‘60s and ‘70s applied the lessons of the new left and civil rights movements to generate a women’s health movement. The new movement shifted from the struggle to revolutionize health care to the focus of ending sex discrimination and gender stereotypes perpetuated in mainstream medical contexts. Moving from the campaign for legal abortion to the creation of community clinics and feminist health centers, Nelson illustrates how these activists revolutionized health care by associating it with the changing social landscape in which women had power to control their own life choices. More Than Medicine poignantly reveals how social justice activists in the United States gradually transformed the meaning of health care, pairing traditional notions of medicine with less conventional ideas of “healthy” social and political environments.

NEW! Case studies for the Next Generation NCLEX®. NEW! Content on COVID-19 includes current recommendations from professional organizations related to vaccines and the care of pregnant women and newborns. UPDATED! Increased coverage of the needs of nontraditional families. UPDATED! Coverage of legislative changes that affect health care delivery in the United States. UPDATED! Current recommendations and practice changes from professional organizations, such as the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), the Association for Women’s Health, Obstetric and Neonatal Nurses (AWHONN), and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). UPDATED! Enhanced content on client- and family-centered care focuses on diversity and cultural assessment. UPDATED! Added emphasis on racial disparities in relation to women’s health and childbearing. UPDATED! Cutting-edge content on treatments for breast cancer.

Elle's 30 BEST BOOKS OF THE SUMMER "A jaw-dropping investigation into the women's health industry." —Shelf-Awareness "A fascinating examination of the past and present of women's healthcare" —Delfina V Barbiero, USA TODAY "A must-read for women, especially any woman who might ever need to see a doctor. " —The Washington Post American women visit more doctors, have more surgery, and fill more prescriptions than men. In Everything Below the Waist, Jennifer Block asks: Why is the life expectancy of women today declining relative to women in other high-income countries, and even relative to the generation before them? Block examines several staples of modern women's health care, from fertility technology to contraception to pelvic surgery to miscarriage treatment, and finds that while overdiagnosis and overtreatment persist in medicine writ large, they are particularly acute for women. One third of mothers give birth by major surgery; roughly half of women lose their uterus to hysterectomy. Feminism turned the world upside down, yet to a large extent the doctors' office has remained stuck in time. Block returns to the 1970s women's health movement to understand how in today's supposed age of empowerment, women's bodies are still so vulnerable to medical control—particularly their sex organs, and as result, their sex lives. In this urgent book, Block tells the stories of patients, clinicians, and reformers, uncovering history and science that could revolutionize the standard of care, and change the way women think about their health. Everything Below the Waist challenges all people to take back control of their bodies.

"The women's health movement in the United States, beginning in 1969 and taking hold in the 1970s, was a broad-based movement seeking to increase women's bodily knowledge, reproductive control, and well-being. It was a political movement that insisted that bodily autonomy provided the key to women's liberation. It was also an institution-building movement that sought to transform women's relationship with medicine; it was dedicated to increasing women's access to affordable health care without the barriers of homophobia, racism, and sexism. But the movement did not only focus on women's bodies. It also encouraged activists to reimagine their relationships with one another, to develop their relationships in the name of personal and political change, and, eventually, to discover and confront the limitations of the bonds of womanhood. This book examines historically the emergence, development, travails, and successes of the women's health movement in the United States. By bringing medical history and the history of women's bodies into our emerging understandings of second-wave feminism, the author sheds light on the understudied health needs and health activism of lesbians and others outside the hospital-in the home, the dispensary, the church basement, the bookshop, and the clinic. At its center are the politics, institutions, and relationships created by and within the women's health movement, depicted primarily from the perspective of the activists who shaped its priorities, fought its battles, and struggled with its shortcomings"--

Examines the real world of women's health status and health-care delivery in different countries, and the assumptions behind the dominant medical model of solving problems without regard to social conditions. This book asks what feminist health-care ethics looks like if we start with women's experiences and concerns.