Catherine Maternowska will discuss new book on Haiti

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M. Catherine Maternowska will discuss her new book, Reproducing Inequalities: Poverty and the Politics of Reproduction in Haiti

Book Launches
The Simone de Beauvoir Institute is proud to host
Dr. M. Catherine Maternowska
Assistant Professor, Center for Reproductive Health Research and Policy,
University of California, San Francisco.

who will be discussing her new book:

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REPRODUCING INEQUALITIES: Poverty and the Politics of Population in Haiti

Tuesday, November 14, 2006
Simone de Beauvoir Institute
2170 Bishop
Montreal, Quebec
Conference Room MU 203 ? 12:00 noon

In Reproducing Inequities, M. Catherine Maternowska argues that we too easily overlook the political dynamics that shape choices about family planning. Through a detailed study of the attempt to provide modern contraception in the community of Cité Soleil, Maternowska demonstrates the complex interplay between local and global politics that so often thwarts well-intended policy initiatives.

Dr. Maternowska is a medical anthropologist interested in exploring the ways that health-related policies can harm, rather than enhance public health, and using ethnographic research as a tool for investigating how best to improve policy and ultimately practice. She is developing further studies on the social dynamics of NGO activities in health that assess the interface between international development, national counterparts and the poor communities they are supposed to serve. Dr. Maternowska is also interested in pushing to improve access to contraceptives as a reproductive right and designing projects that ensure access to needed health care for poor women and men.

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Reproducing Inequities

Price: $26.95

Subtitle: Poverty and the Politics of Population in Haiti
Author: M. Catherine Maternowska
Subject: Anthropology/Gender
Paper ISBN 0-8135-3854-8
Cloth ISBN 0-8135-3853-X
Pages: 256 pp. 11 b&w illustrations
Series: Studies in Medical Anthropology
Foreword by Paul Farmer

Description:

Residents of Haiti-one of the poorest and most unstable countries in the world-face a grim reality of starvation, violence, lack of economic opportunity, and minimal health care. For years, aid organizations have sought to alleviate the problems by creating health and family planning clinics, including one modern (and, by local standards, luxurious) center in the heart of Cité Soleil. During its height of service in the 1980s and 1990s, the clinic boasted nineteen staff members, an array of modern contraceptives, an accessible location, and convenient hours-but very few clients.

Why did this initiative fail so spectacularly despite surveys finding that residents would like to have fewer children? Why don't poor women heed the message of family planning, when smaller families seem to be in their best interest? In Reproducing Inequities, M. Catherine Maternowska argues that we too easily overlook the political dynamics that shape choices about family planning. Through a detailed study of the attempt to provide modern contraception in the community of Cité Soleil, Maternowska demonstrates the complex interplay between local and global politics that so often thwarts well-intended policy initiatives.

Medical anthropologists, she argues, have an important role to play in developing new action plans for better policy implementation. Ethnographic studies in desperate, dangerous locations provide essential data that can point the way to solutions for the dilemmas of contraception in poor communities worldwide.

About the Author:

M. Catherine Maternowska is an assistant professor in the departments of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive sciences as well as anthropology, history, and social medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Paul Farmer is the Presley Professor of Medical Anthropology at Harvard Medical School and cofounder of Partners In Healt