Diversity and Objectivity in Medicine

International Journal of Epidemiology, 2001

Society, 2002

1983

Dr. Luxton was a.fine role model, who helped me overcome periods of academic insecurity, and forced me to take my own thoughts and ideas seriously. I also wish to thank Deb, Sandy, Chris, and Sam. Despite the fac~ that it was a period when I took more than I gave, they furnished with unqualified support. In particular, Sandy, who was under the same stress and time constraints, was nevertheless always willing to listen to me, yet again. Finally, I would like to thank Helen, who, althoqgh not my wife, was my typist. Helen was considerably more patient than I ever would have been.

Britain and the World, 2014

This project situates infant mortality within a progressive women’s health paradigm (Clarke and Olesen). The domain of “maternal/child health” in which IM is located is a set of practices targeting women’s bodies that may not, in fact, foreground women’s needs and interests, raising urgent questions about how nations can reduce child death rates without defining and treating women as exclusively reproductive. We suggest that women’s empowerment could readily be used in place of the IMR, leading to policies more favorable to women while also improving infant death rates. Our analysis owes much to Foucault’s genealogies. Social practices and institutions established to regulate a population’s quality (and quantity) of life are termed biopolitical, whereas biopower refers to disciplinary practices that operate on and through bodies to create subjects. Foucault identifies biopower as originating at the dawn of the nineteenth century, with the proliferation of medicine, demography, and psychiatry. These new regimes of knowledge and practice generated certain kinds of bodies and subjects (e.g., the prisoner, the insane, the patient) while also cultivating and building on developing technologies. With each regime have come new biopolitical objects, or socio-technical entities around which knowledge and practices congeal through the work of building institutional practices. In the late nineteenth-century U.S., when rates of child death were very high especially among immigrants, vital statistics allowed for measuring and aggregating patterns of human biological processes such as birth and death. The infant mortality rate emerged as a biopolitical object, and the infant-at-risk became a new subject of governance (Armstrong). This object—quantified, aggregated, and mobilizable—became the impetus for the U.S. Children’s Bureau, immigration policies, and maternal education initiatives. As rates decreased these initiatives also declined, so much so that currently there is no Federal program designed to ameliorate high infant death rates in the U.S. We are interested in a uniquely twenty-first century form of transnational governance: the UN Millennium Development Goals. If at-risk-infants are the subjects in question, and the IMR the flexible object, then the MDGs must be considered part of a biopolitical apparatus designed to fix the problem of infant mortality. This apparatus—comprised of human, technical, and discursive elements—relies heavily on the “fact” of the infant mortality rate. Through the rate’s distribution across various networks, the infant-at-risk is continually reproduced rhetorically. Yet rarely is its facticity challenged. Thus, we are not merely asking whether statistical measures need to address what is left out, but whether the register itself is fundamentally flawed (Waring).

Medical History, 2007

Feminist Legal Studies, 2013

Journal of Biosocial Science, 2002

Birth and Death in British Culture: Liminality, Power, and Performance (edited by Anette Pankratz, Claus-Ulrich Viol, and Ariane de Waal), 2012

Medical History, 2019

This paper explores the influence of English female doctors on the creation of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) and the production and circulation of contraceptive knowledge in England and, to a lesser extent in France, between 1930 and 1970. By drawing on the writings of female doctors and proceedings of international conferences as well as the archives of the British Medical Women’s Federation (MWF) and Family Planning Association (FPA), on the one hand, andMouvement Français pour le Planning Familial(MFPF), on the other, this paper explores the agency of English female doctors at the national and transnational level. I recover their pioneering work and argue that they were pivotal in legitimising family planning within medical circles. I then turn to their influence on French doctors after World War II. Not only were English medical women active and experienced agents in the family planning movement in England; they also represented a conduit of information ...

maternalhealthandwellbeing.com

Feminist Legal Studies, 2014

International Journal of Epidemiology, 2007