and ain't i a woman?: Raising the alarm about women's health
On newsstands advertising the Melbourne Herald Sun on April 11, the banner headline declared a "Women's Health Alarm". This was a reference to the ruling by the Health Insurance Commission that Melbourne pathology company General Diagnostic Laboratories (GDL) had failed the test for adequate screening of pap smear results for the second time.
Previous concerns had been raised about tests from 1998 and 1999, with the latest doubts regarding tests carried out from 2000 to March 2001. As a result, some 30,000 Victorian women have been sent letters requesting that they have additional pap smears.
Sydney pathology companies, Medtest and Wielebinski Pathology, have also come under investigation, potentially requiring 3700 NSW women to take additional tests.
An initial ruling by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal banned the Herald Sun from publishing the name of GDL as a company under investigation. This prompted a front-page story in the paper on March 7 in which Russell Robinson, the journalist covering the story, declared that "the Herald Sun has been gagged from reporting an issue of vital public interest — the health and well-being of Victoria's women".
Alarm bells may start ringing on the rare occasion that a service provider is caught in dodgy practices, but while the risk of cervical cancer is a major concern, women's health can't simply be measured by the health of our reproductive organs.
Health status data indicates that some of the critical factors that have negative effects on women's health include the stress caused by women's dual roles as paid workers and unpaid carers, as well as problems with accessing health services and information, and lack of control in health service provision.
Researchers rarely address the impact of gender discrimination on women's health. However, health is inextricably linked with a person's social position. The widening gap between rich and poor, the backlash against women's rights as having "gone too far", women's lower income and cutbacks to services such as childcare and aged care, all have a heavy impact on women's health.
Discrimination is a key factor in mental and physical health. The 2002 strategy paper published by the Office of Women's Policy in Victoria indicates that lesbians, Aboriginal women, women with disabilities, rural women, women from non-English speaking backgrounds and women who have left prison are some of the groups that have difficulty accessing adequate and appropriate services as a result of discrimination.
Some of the major causes of women's ill health are clearly related to how they are treated by men. One in four Australian women experiences domestic violence from a male partner, with one in five women being sexually assaulted by the age of 18.
Job insecurity, increased casualisation and occupational health and safety problems are often inadequately addressed in less unionised work places with a predominately female work force.
Sexual harassment in the work place is still a major concern for working women.
Eating disorders are common among young women, and nearly 70% of young women in the underweight to healthy weight categories surveyed between 1995 and 1999 by Women's Health Australia said they would like to weigh less.
Women are twice as likely as men to suffer major depression, which according to the World Health Organisation is the primary disease burden for women in both developed and underdeveloped countries.
During the second wave of feminism in the 1970s, the women's health movement arose as an acknowledgement that women's health is affected by social, particularly gender, relations. While some things have changed in the last 20 years, the same key demands are still being made by feminists — for women's voices to be heard, and for women to have choice and control through adequate access to information.
Problems being taken up by feminists today in relation to women's health include male-dominated services and gender-blind delivery, medicalisation of pregnancy, overemphasis on women's reproductive function as the cause of health problems, lack of access to accurate information and gender-blind research.
The negligence of the pap smear pathology companies is no surprise in a health system which is run for profit. Health care provision in capitalist society is seen in terms of providing services that assist the absence of disease, preferably using medication patented by a big drug company.
The provision of health services alone will not stop women becoming thinner and more depressed. Crucial to improving women's health is the eradication of gender discrimination through eradication of the economic system that makes such discrimination profitable.
BY NATALIE ZIRNGAST
[The author is a member of the Democratic Socialist Party.]
From Green Left Weekly, April 24, 2002.
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