I recently attended the Association of Maternal and Child Health Programs (AMCHP) annual conference in Washington, D.C. While I learned a lot about what is happening at the state and local level to improve maternal and child health outcomes, I was surprised that abortion was not included in any of the breakout session titles or as a focus in any of the plenaries I attended. As the Guttmacher Institute notes, “Nearly half of pregnancies among American women are unintended, and about four in 10 of these are terminated by abortion.” A total of 3.95 million births took place in the U.S. during 2011, compared with just over 1 million abortions that same year. Why wouldn’t a conference about maternal and child health include a session on abortion?
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health inequity
Legitimizing Racist Science, Naturalizing Health Disparities
StandardOn August 15, I attended the first part of an all-day event commemorating the work of Troy Duster, a sociologist who documents the relationship between biomedical science, racism and other forms of social stratification, and public policy. The University of California-Berkeley’s Center for Genetics and Society, which aims to “encourage responsible uses and effective societal governance of human genetic and reproductive technologies and other emerging technologies,” hosted the event. Dorothy Roberts gave the opening address and framed her remarks around the pervasive myths that exist regarding the relationship between science and race and how these myths help naturalize racial health disparities. Continue reading