PUBLIC HEALTH

Political and Social Context of Public health



Political and Social Context of Public Health

Task 1

Teenage pregnancy has become a pressing issue in the western countries especially in U.K. and U.S. Biological determinists explain the differences between men and women according to the differences in their reproductive systems. According to the male-dominated world of science, the organs and functions of motherhood biologically handicap women. This handicap is said to go back to the animal world and makes females helpless and dependent upon the superior m le sex to provide for them and their young. Spear, (2004, p.120) recognizes the obvious biological differences between men and women, she finds no justification for the oppression of women in nature or in the study of primitive, classless societies.

However, in nature, females suffer no disability compared to males, but that it was with the rise of patriarchal class-based society and the development of the family as a social and economic institution, that the biological make-up of women became the ideological pretext for keeping them in servile status. Women's absence from the workforce or in education less then reinforced the notion that women were intellectually inferior due to their 'reproductive specialization'. Those women who challenged the narrow role prescribed to them were pathologies by medical men as hysterical.

Thus, women who rebelled could be defined as sick and subjected to a range of treatments including cliterodectomy, as doctors attributed distress to biological factors rather than addressing the socio-political conditions underlying their behavior. These nineteenth-century biological ideas may seem out of date, but women's bodies are still used to define and confine women today. The male domination of science and medicine has led to a tendency to view the natural processes of the female body as pathological (Lee 2008, p23). Science reduces women to a product of their hormones and thus infers that women are less able than men to act rationally and are inherently unpredictable, so controlling their life chances (Lee 2008, p23). Pre-menstrual syndrome, postnatal depression and the menopause are perceived as problematic outcomes of normal physiological processes. Rates of psychological distress are low both during and after the menopause and, where distress arises; it is better explained by social and familial stress than by hormonal changes (Lee 2008, p24). Within the medical model, childbirth is viewed as a hazardous process only normal in retrospect. Women's bodies are viewed with the same paternalistic stereotypes that have controlled women for centuries - unpredictable, frail and irrational.

Developing practice nurse roles is critical to establishing communitybased contraception and sexual health services foryoung people, and reducing teenage pregnancy. To date, service provision has been patchy, often lacking in quality and, reportedly, problematic for some vulnerable groups. In some areas, practices provide services to young people through a local enhanced service agreement. In addition, there may be opportunities for practices or consortia to develop their services in conjunction with the local commissioning of contraception and sexual health services. Most practices already provide contraception, and many are now taking ...