Seeking women’s health justice has always been a struggle. The trajectory of women’s health has been a tortuous vacillated pathway. Today that path is at a crossroads. By reviewing this pathway, the social and political factors that have led to the current confused mixture of women’s health will be illuminated. These factors include a dysfunctional health care system, financial aspects of women’s health care, and that even though health justice for women is far more than access to health services, only when the United States prioritizes people over the Pentagon, can we truly begin to provide robust health care for women.

We’ll review the major contributors to this crossroads, and consider how we can deal with them.

It is time for women’s health advocates to re-energize to combat barriers to women’s health justice.

Speakers:

Jamie Marsella is a PhD candidate in the History of Science at Harvard University. Her work focuses on race and gender in public health and medicine, with a particular focus on how racial science and religion have influenced women and children’s health. Her work focuses on the intersection between race, gender, and medicine in the development of women and children’s public health programming.

Martha Livingston, Ph.D., is Professor and Chair of the Public Health department at SUNY Old Westbury and Vice-Chair of the Board of Directors of the New York Metro chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program. She is an organizer of the Socialist Caucus of the American Public Health Association, a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Public Health Policy and of the Steering Committee of the Labor Campaign for Single Payer Health Care, and co-editor, with Mary E. O’Brien, M.D., of 10 Excellent Reasons for National Health Care (New York: The New Press, 2008).

Jasmine Owens is a Senior Fellow with the Win Without War Education Fund. She brings an extensive background in nuclear weapons with her master’s in Nonproliferation and Terrorism Studies from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, and her professional experiences from Outrider Foundation, Council on Strategic Risks, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, and ReThink Media. Her work and her passions focus on centering our collective humanity in the fight for a more just and equitable world, starting with the abolition of nuclear weapons.