Global Prescriptions: Gendering Health and Human Rights

by Rosalind Pollack Petchesky

Global Prescriptions is a critical yet optimistic analysis of the role of transnational women's groups in setting the agendas for women's health in international and national settings. The book reviews a decade of women's participation in UN conferences, transnational networks, national advocacy efforts and sexual and reproductive health provision, assessing both their strengths and weaknesses. It critiques the Cairo, Beijing and Copenhagen conference documents and World Bank, WHO and health sector reform policies. It also offers case studies of national-level reform and advocacy efforts and appraises the controversy concerning TRIPS, trade, and essential AIDS drugs. That controversy, Petchesky argues, starkly illuminates the 'collision course' of transnational corporate and global trade agendas with the struggle for gender, racial and regional equity and the human right to health.

The author takes into account the formidable political and ideological forces confronting global justice movements and also offers a sobering reassessment of transnational women's NGOs themselves and such problems as 'NGOization', fragmentation and donor-dependency. Petchesky argues that the power of women's transnational coalitions is only as great as their organic connection with grassroots social movements.

Genres: Feminism

320 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2003

Reviews

[Carolyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was assigned parts of this books for a college class, but I found the material so engaging I read all of it. She talks about health from a human rights perspective but what makes it unique is how she tracks legal history (including victories) and combines feminist theory as well. The most interesting chapter is the one about hiv/aids.

[Brimate · Rating 3 out of 5]

read part of for class. it doesn't have a radical analysis but does provide an important feminism analysis of global human rights.