Women’s Health in the Context of the Politics of Globalisation

The focus of the autonomous women’s health movement has broadened noticeably. In the 1970s and 1980s it was reproductive rights. In 1997, at the Eighth IWHM in Brazil it was ‘Women’s Health, Poverty and Quality of Life’ in light of the gender, race and social class approaches. And, at the (Ninth) IWHM meet in Canada in 2002, it was ‘Women’s Reproductive Rights, the Impact of Violence (State and Family) on Women’s Health, and the Impact of the Environment (Natural and Built) on Women’s Health’.

The Tenth IWHM builds on past conferences, placing the issues of women’s rights, health rights, including reproductive health rights, linking these to violence and the environment, and placing them in the context of the politics of globalisation. The meeting, to be held in New Delhi, India from September 21-26, 2005 will bring together about 700 participants from all over the world.

Worldwide, healthcare is the focus of policy changes, the current trend being to institute ‘reforms’ that are characterised by privatisation and scaling back subsidies and other forms of ‘welfare’ healthcare. The world today is also marked by highly scaled-up violence, social, political, in armed conflicts and within the family.

This and other recent trends are the focus of the Tenth IWHM in its five-day deliberations of various questions and issues under the broad theme ‘Health Rights, Women’s Lives: Challenges & Strategies for Movement Building’.

The International Women and Health Meetings, from the first one in Rome in 1977, are significantly different from other networks in that these conferences mark a meeting of minds of people representing autonomous women’s movements. The absence of a permanent secretariat and organizational structure fosters debate and sharing of a wealth of varied opinions, ideas and information from women across the globe, enriching the process with their diverse experiences.

Including a wide range of organisations, networks, and grassroots women’s groups, the IWHM has its roots in the global women’s movement, a movement that has created spaces for women’s perspectives to be heard and incorporated into policy formulation and program implementation across nations.

Today, the view of women’s health and healthcare requirements has moved beyond the needs of procreation and maternity. It is also now widely accepted that health is dependent on age, economic class, income levels, race, caste, ethnicity, culture, location, disability, marital status and sexual orientation; and that it is also intrinsically linked to the production and reproduction roles that women play. Within these parameters, women’s healthcare needs are specific.

Hazardous work and living environments, the loss of sustenance, livelihoods and increasing poverty, lowered healthcare subsidies are all seen to have clear gender-specific impacts.

The Tenth IWHM focuses on various issues under five themes: Public Health, Health Sector Reforms and Gender; Reproductive and Sexual Health Rights; The Politics and the Resurgence of Population Policies; Women’s Rights and Medical Technologies; and Violence (of State, Militarism, Family and ‘Development’) and Women’s Health. 

Public Health, Health Sector Reforms and Gender

The decade past has seen several countries executing ‘structural adjustment programs’, all of these characterized by the progressive withdrawal of state support (through subsidies or welfare) to healthcare services, adversely affecting the poor and, particularly, poor women. The Tenth IWHM hopes to understand how these processes have had an impact across gender, class, caste, race, disability, sexuality and ethnicity.

 Reproductive and Sexual Health Rights

During the past decade, reproductive and sexual rights have seen a number of shifts, both forward and backward. Diverse struggles are being waged around the world on these issues. The Tenth IWHM will discuss the common threads of patriarchal dominance that women in general and sexual minorities in particular face.

The Politics And The Resurgence Of Population Policies

Despite the fact that most countries have vouched to abide by the ICPD Platform of Action, which upholds sexual and reproductive rights, the opinion for population control policies is gaining ground across the globe. Consequently, the reversal of sexual and reproductive rights is being witnessed under different guises in different countries. The Tenth IWHM will discuss issues of demographics and the politics of population control.

Women's Rights And Medical Technologies

The IWHM will, for the first time, focus on the complexities and contradictions that medical technology; medical education and medical practices pose for the health of people in general and for women in particular. Among specific concern under discussion are issues of strategizing for the effective implementation of international ethical guidelines and regulations for testing and use of new technologies, mainstreaming women-friendly safe practices and knowledge systems, including traditional knowledge, and the structures and functioning of medical systems and technologies that affect health in the context of social inequalities.

Violence (Of State, Militarism, Family and 'Development') and Women's Health

The linkage between health and healthcare and violence in families is well established though the remedies have been insufficiently addressed. On the other hand, the increasing militarisation of countries and regions is as yet under-researched and still less spoken about. The more direct adverse impacts for women in militarized zones include an increase in prostitution and the contemporaneous risk of HIV/AIDS. The most deleterious indirect fallout is that an increase in military budgets is almost always at the cost of funds for social services. The Tenth IWHM will focus on the multiple ways in which segments of the population, women in particular, experience violence with deleterious consequences for their very survival and health.

  IWHM Correspondent 

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