The politics of healthThe politics of health
May 28 is the International Day of Action for Women's Health, first marked in 1987. This year's demand — to stop the privatisation of health care — is being raised by hundreds of women's organisations around the world.
The call for action points out that even though neo-liberal economic policies have been implemented in different ways and at different paces in each country over the last decade, the budget cuts, privatisation of public enterprises and services, centralisation of public expenditure and wide range of economic restructuring strategies have produced the same outcome: the impoverishment of a wide section of the population.
Public health, the call says, has ceased to be regarded as a basic human right. "Instead, within the context of a privatised market, it has become a new type of commodity to be purchased ... access to health care, which in the past failed to cover all people, and in particular women, has become even more restricted for the majority of women."
The consequences were documented in the 1994 World Health Organisation's report Women's Health and Human Rights. That report estimated that, every year, 500,000 women die from preventable pregnancy-related causes; that unsafe abortions as a result of inadequate access to family planning services account for 25-50% of all maternal deaths; and that women suffer more severe consequences of the most common diseases (including malaria, leprosy and tuberculosis) because their diets are generally poorer than men's, they work longer and harder, and they tend to ignore the symptoms of disease because of the responsibility they take for the care of other family members.
In the Third World, the debt crisis remains the single greatest cause of women's deteriorating health. The imposition of World Bank and IMF structural adjustment programs on countries already bled dry by colonisation and by multinational corporations after "independence" means even fewer resources for general health education, information and services, let alone for the specific needs of women. In just two years after the introduction of an SAP in Zimbabwe in the early 1980s, maternal mortality doubled.
In countries like Australia, too, the capitalist austerity drive is costing women their health.
The restrictions on choice of medicines imposed by the federal government in the May 13 budget, for example, will hit the elderly — who are often both sick and poor — very hard. The majority of the elderly are women.
The privatisation of public hospital services by both Labor and Coalition governments also damages women's health. The transfer of the administration of some public hospitals in NSW to the Catholic Church, for example, has resulted in the withdrawal of contraception and abortion services from those hospitals. More unwanted pregnancies mean more health problems for women and more backyard abortions.
Because most women's wages are still significantly lower and less secure than most men's, and they are still the majority of those dependent on welfare payments, state and federal government funding cuts to health services and the Coalition's attacks on Medicare, too, directly discriminate against all but the richest of women.
These policies are all part of the neo-liberal agenda of cutting public spending and increasing private profits, possible only if women can be forced to assume, free of charge in the family home, much more of the socially necessary work of care for other workers, children, the aged and the sick.
In order to implement this agenda, women's life choices and control over their reproduction must be much more restricted. It is no surprise, then, that the federal health minister, Michael Wooldridge, has announced that the government is not prepared even to consider the recommendations of a report, prepared by a National Health and Medical Research Council committee, released last week.
The report recommends that the morning-after contraceptive pill be sold across the counter as a means of reducing the need for abortions; that existing abortion laws be relaxed; and that the government undertake further testing of the abortion pill RU486 which, despite Family Planning Association tests indicating that it is a safer alternative to surgical abortions, was banned by federal parliament last year.
Good health and control over their reproductive lives are prerequisites for women's full participation in economic and political life. In turn, participation in political life is the only path to safeguarding and improving women's health.
Every campaign against funding cuts to health budgets, against the privatisation of health services and in defence of universal public health insurance is, therefore, a feminist campaign — a step forward in the struggle for equality for women.
By Lisa Macdonald