Engendering International Health: The Challenge of Equity (Basic Bioethics)

Rating:
Summary: Ironic
Review: Only relatively recently has gender emerged as a cause of health inequity. By contrast, for over a century, it has been recognised that the wealthy have access to better health care than the poor. In developed countries, universal health care lessens this inequity. But developing countries still have this burden, plus a newly recognised inequity due to gender.

This book explains the latter. Both in developed and developing countries. The authors found that there are measurable differences in healthcare. The starkest differences are in poor countries, or the poor sections of developed countries. They also raise concern that structural macroeconomic reforms in a poor country, perhaps (often?) to better service its foreign debt, might have the unforeseen impact of worsening healthcare amongst its women. If so, it would be grimly ironic, because these reforms are often aimed at ultimately helping that nation.