The politics of women's health organisations

Show notesThe story in this episode is composite, drawn from real events. The identifying details have been changed to protect privacy, but the situations and the political contexts are real. Real-world events the story draws on, full citations, and further reading are below.REAL-WORLD EVENTS REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODEAustraliaThe Senate Community Affairs References Committee inquiry into universal access to reproductive healthcare was referred on 28 September 2022, initiated by Greens Senator Larissa Waters. The committee reported in May 2023 with thirty-six recommendations, the first inquiry of its kind in Australia. The recommendations covered the cost and accessibility of contraception and abortion, workforce development including scope of practice for nurses and midwives, Medicare and Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme coverage, birthing services in non-metropolitan public hospitals, and birthing-on-country initiatives. The inquiry was framed in relation to the priorities of the National Women’s Health Strategy 2020-2030. The Australian women’s health centre movement established community-controlled women’s health services from the mid-1970s. The Liverpool Women’s Health Centre and the Leichhardt Women’s Community Health Centre, both in Sydney, opened in 1974, among the first of their kind in the country. The centres were founded by women radicalised through second-wave feminist organising and built services addressing the structural barriers women faced in the mainstream health system. A federation of community-based women’s health centres developed across Australia in the decade that followed and continues to operate today. The Lowitja Institute, Australia’s national institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health research, and the Aboriginal community- controlled health sector represented nationally through the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation (NACCHO) hold the institutional knowledge base on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women’s health, including maternal health, cervical screening, and culturally safe reproductive healthcare.IrelandThe Citizens’ Assembly of Ireland met across 2016 and 2017, a randomly-selected panel of ninety-nine members of the public and an independent chair, established to consider a number of constitutional questions including the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution of Ireland. The Eighth Amendment, inserted in 1983, gave constitutional recognition to the equal right to life of the pregnant woman and the unborn, with the effect of prohibiting abortion in almost all circumstances. The Assembly deliberated across five weekends and recommended substantial change. A referendum held on 25 May 2018 returned a 66.4 per cent vote in favour of repealing the Eighth Amendment. The Together for Yes campaign, a civil-society coalition, organised the repeal campaign drawing on decades of Irish feminist movement work. The repeal led to the Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act 2018. The Irish process is internationally studied as a model of deliberative-democratic reform on a politically contested healthcare question.IcelandOn 24 October 1975 an estimated ninety per cent of Icelandic women withdrew from all paid and unpaid work for the day, in an action known as the Women’s Day Off, or Kvennafrídagurinn. Tens of thousands gathered in central Reykjavik, and the withdrawal of women’s labour effectively closed schools, shops, banks, and many other services across the country. The strike is widely credited with accelerating the political conditions for the 1980 election of Vigdís Finnbogadóttir as President of Iceland, the world’s first democratically elected woman head of state, and for the longer-running Icelandic policy framework on reproductive healthcare, parental leave, and gender equality. International theoretical tradition Carol Bacchi, an emeritus professor of politics at the University of Adelaide, developed the What’s the Problem Represented to Be approach to policy analysis, known as WPR, across her scholarship from the early 1990s onward. The approach holds that every policy proposal contains within it an implicit representation of what the problem is, and that the political work of policy lies in that problem representation rather than in the technical recommendations attached to it. The reproductive justice framework was coined in June 1994 by a group of twelve Black women in Chicago, who called themselves Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice. The framework was built into a national organisation, the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, founded in 1997. The Black feminist scholar and organiser Loretta Ross is widely credited as the framework’s leading articulator across the past three decades. Reproductive justice is defined as the human right to have children, to not have children, and to parent the children one has in safe and sustainable communities, a broader frame than the reproductive rights tradition that preceded it. Marcia Langton, a Yiman woman and Foundation Chair of Australian Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne, has argued across four decades of scholarship that the health of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women cannot be analysed apart from sovereignty, the history of child removal, incarceration, and the structural racism of the mainstream health system.REFERENCES[1] Carol Bacchi, Analysing Policy: What’s the Problem Represented to Be? (Frenchs Forest, New South Wales: Pearson Education, 2009); Carol Bacchi and Susan Goodwin, Poststructural Policy Analysis: A Guide to Practice (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52546-8.[2] Loretta J. Ross and Rickie Solinger, Reproductive Justice: An Introduction (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520288201/reproductive-justice; SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, “Reproductive Justice,” https://www.sistersong.net/reproductive-justice (Accessed: 16 May 2026).[3] Marcia Langton, Welcome to Country: A Travel Guide to Indigenous Australia (Melbourne: Hardie Grant Travel, 2018); Marcia Langton and others, eds., Indigenous Australians and the Law (Abingdon: Routledge-Cavendish, 2009). On Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women’s health specifically, see Lowitja Institute, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Women’s Health (Melbourne: Lowitja Institute), https://www.lowitja.org.au (Accessed: 16 May 2026).[4] The Citizens’ Assembly (Ireland), First Report and Recommendations of the Citizens’ Assembly: The Eighth Amendment of the Constitution (Dublin: The Citizens’ Assembly, 2017), https://citizensassembly.ie/previous-assemblies/2016-2018-citizens-assembly/the-eighth-amendment-of-the-constitution/ (Accessed: 16 May 2026).[5] Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act 2018 (Ireland), No. 31 of 2018, https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2018/act/31/enacted/en/html (Accessed: 16 May 2026); on the referendum result and campaign, see Kevin Rafter and others, eds., The Abortion Referendum of 2018 (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2024).[6] Kirstie Brewer, “The Day Iceland’s Women Went on Strike,” BBC News, 23 October 2015, https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34602822 (Accessed: 16 May 2026); on the strike’s place in the Icelandic political settlement, see Auður Styrkársdóttir, Women’s Lists in Iceland: A Response to Political Lethargy (Umeå: Umeå University, 1998).[7] Gwendolyn Gray, “The Politics of Women’s Health in Australia,” in Australian Health Policy, and on the women’s health centre movement, Australian Women’s Health Network, History of the Women’s Health Movement in Australia, https://awhn.org.au (Accessed: 16 May 2026); Marie Coleman and others, accounts of the establishment of the Leichhardt Women’s Community Health Centre, 1974.[8] Senate Community Affairs References Committee, Universal Access to Reproductive Healthcare (Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, May 2023), https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Community_Affairs/ReproductiveHealthcare (Accessed: 16 May 2026).[9] Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Performance Framework (Canberra: AIHW), https://www.indigenoushpf.gov.au (Accessed: 16 May 2026); Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Mothers and Babies (Canberra: AIHW), https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports-data/population-groups/mothers-babies/overview (Accessed: 16 May 2026).[10] Carol Bacchi, “Why Study Problematizations? Making Politics Visible,” Open Journal of Political Science 2, no. 1 (2012): 1-8, https://doi.org/10.4236/ojps.2012.21001.[11] Australian Women’s Health Network and the federation of community women’s health services, sector submissions to the Senate inquiry into universal access to reproductive healthcare, 2022, https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Community_Affairs/ReproductiveHealthcare/Submissions (Accessed: 16 May 2026).[12] Commonwealth of Australia, National Women’s Health Strategy 2020-2030 (Canberra: Department of Health, 2018), https://www.health.gov.au/resources/publications/national-womens-health-strategy-2020-2030 (Accessed: 16 May 2026).FURTHER READINGBacchi, Carol. Analysing Policy: What’s the Problem Represented to Be? Frenchs Forest, New South Wales: Pearson Education, 2009. The foundational statement of the WPR approach used in this episode.Bacchi, Carol, and Susan Goodwin. Poststructural Policy Analysis: A Guide to Practice. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. A practical companion applying the WPR approach across policy fields.Ross, Loretta J., and Rickie Solinger. Reproductive Justice: An Introduction. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. The standard introduction to the reproductive justice framework by one of its founding theorists.Ross, Loretta J., Lynn Roberts, Erika Derkas, Whitney Peoples, and Pamela Bridgewater Toure, eds. Radical Reproductive Justice: Foundation, Theory, Practice, Critique. New York: Feminist Press, 2017. A wider collection setting out the movement’s intellectual and organising history.Langton, Marcia. Welcome to Country: A Travel Guide to Indigenous Australia. Melbourne: Hardie Grant Travel, 2018. Langton’s accessible survey of Indigenous Australia, useful background to her wider scholarship.Baird, Barbara. Abortion in Australia: Access, Politics and History. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2023. A recent account of the political history of abortion access in Australia.Reagan, Leslie J. When Abortion Was a Crime. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. A historical account of reproductive healthcare politics that informs the comparative material in this episode.Australian Women’s Health Network. History of the Women’s Health Movement in Australia. A movement-produced account of the establishment and development of community women’s health services.All works, organisations, scholars, legislation, and historical events listed above are real and citable. For any source intended for formal academic or professional writing, direct verification against the original publication or institutional record is recommended. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit civicsandcommerce.substack.com