News at the Centre for the History of Medicine
Improving Maternity Care through Women’s Voices: The Women’s Health Strategy Continues a Long Process of Advocacy
Congratulations to Dr Fabiola Creed and Professor Hilary Marland for the publication of their policy paper in the online journal History & Policy.
The article explores the role of women’s voices in shaping maternity care during the twentieth century and you can read it in full here.
Executive Summary
- Effective maternity care has been hampered by limited service provision and inadequate funding throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century.
- Pronatalist policies dominated maternity care in the first half of the twentieth century, moving to a growing consumer-led emphasis in the post-war period.
- Historical events – war, the creation of the National Health Service, the hospitalisation and medicalisation of childbirth, and the feminist health movement – led to fundamental changes in maternity services and care.
- After 1900, women became vocal in expressing their aims for improved maternity care, and their ambitions were most effective when they dovetailed with pronatalist goals.
- Following the expansion of mass media, education, and employment for women since the 1960s, both women’s organisations and individuals developed greater confidence in their campaigns for change and in urging policy makers and health services to listen.
- Descriptions of their own experiences from women of all social circumstances and ethnicities can be converted into powerful tools for lobbying policy makers and government and for raising recognition of postnatal mental illness.
Pilot Programs and Postcolonial Pivots: Pioneering “DNA Fingerprinting” on Britain’s Borders
Professor Roberta Bivins, CHM Director, has had an article published in Contemporary Studies in Society and History.
Pilot Programs and Postcolonial Pivots: Pioneering 'DNA Fingerprinting' on Britain Borders
Developed in Britain and the United States in the 1980s, genetic profiling has since become a global technology. Today, it is widely regarded as the evidentiary “gold standard” in individual and forensic identification. However, its origins as a technology of post-empire at Britain’s externalized borders in South Asia have remained unexamined. This article will argue that the first state-sanctioned use of “DNA fingerprints,” a pilot program exploring its value in disputed cases of family reunification migration from Bangladesh and Pakistan to Britain’s postcolonial cities, repays closer examination. National and transnational responses to the advent of genetic profiling as an identification technology demonstrate the interplay between imperial and postcolonial models and networks of power and truth production. At the same time, this experiment prefigured and conditioned the wider reception of DNA profiling in matters of kinship. Far from being a footnote, the use of genetic profiling by migrants determined to exercise their legal rights in the face of a hostile state also worked to naturalize genetic ties as the markers of “true” familial relationships.
The World Bank’s Advocacy of User Fees in Global Health, c.1970–1997: More Ideology than Evidence?
Dr Chris Sirrs, CHM postdoctoral researcher, has had a chapter he has written with Martin Gorsky at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, published in the latest volume of the Yearbook for the History of Global Development.
This is based partly on research he undertook at the World Bank archives in Washington DC and interviews with former Bank staff and explores the rationale behind the Bank’s controversial promotion of user fees for health services from the 1980s. The chapter is published open access.
Full citation: Martin Gorsky and Christopher Sirrs, ‘The World Bank’s Advocacy of User Fees in Global Health, c.1970–1997: More Ideology than Evidence?’, in Health and Development, ed. Iris Borowy and Bernard Harris, Yearbook for the History of Global Development 2 (De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2023), 277–316, https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111015583-011/html