Tags – Health
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Toward sexual self-determination
Book review
What You Really Really Want is a powerful tool for radically transforming how we understand and navigate the complexities of our own sexuality.
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But we do it anyway
Creative writing contest (hometown winner)
I opened my eyes to find the doctor staring at me. I had been dreaming of dragonflies, filling the brightening sky and stretching their wings in the early morning sun.
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Awaiting justice
The ceaseless struggle of the Lubicon Cree
For three decades, the traditional territory of the Lubicon Cree in northern Alberta has undergone massive oil and gas development without the consent of the Lubicon people and without recognition of our Aboriginal rights.
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Same fight, new foes
Fifty years after the birth of medicare, Canada’s health care system is again under threat
In the summer of 1962, Saskatchewan was beset by a doctors’ strike intent on preserving physician privileges and opposing public health care. Fifty years later, Canada’s medicare system is again under threat.
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Crisis in care
Ontario pioneers the privatization of long-term care
As the pioneer of privatized care in Canada, Ontario has opened the doors for a corporate takeover of long-term care homes, resulting in chronic understaffing by profit-seeking multinational providers.
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Food for all!
Food justice needs migrant justice
In 2009, immigration enforcement entered a community garden outside a Toronto food bank and deported one of its users. The deportation was but one of the 70-odd sweeps, detentions and deportations that happen in Toronto every single day and underscored one of the barriers to food access for undocumented migrants in this country.
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From apple pie and mother’s milk to pop-tarts and formula
How will we feed the next generation?
Ninety per cent of pregnant families in Canada plan to breastfeed their children. After the recommended six months later, less than 25 per cent of those families are still exclusively breastfeeding. This is a story of severed cultural ties to breastfeeding knowledge; “breast is best” lip service by many care providers, hospitals and government funding models; and huge marketing dollars from the big multinationals that produce artificial human milk (marketed as the more genteel “formula”).
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Safer sex work
The case for decriminalization
“In my view the law plays a sufficient contributory role in preventing a prostitute from taking steps that could reduce the risk of such violence.” With these concluding remarks by Justice Susan Himel, the laws that kept sex work illegal in Ontario were struck down in November 2010. The ruling, however, has been stayed, pending an appeal by the federal government that’s scheduled to begin in June, 2011.
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Witch hunts past and present
Book review
In the classic zine Witches, Midwives & Nurses: A History of Women Healers, republished as a book with a new introduction in 2010, authors Deirdre English and Barbara Ehrenreich provide an overview of the repression and exclusion of women lay healers in Europe and the United States. The authors explore the connection between the witch hunts in Europe and attempts to eliminate and discredit women healers, as well as the rise of an elitist and male-dominated medical establishment in the United States.
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Letter from the editor
On walking upstream
Health, and the way we manage our collective well-being, is inherently political. As perhaps the most universally relevant topic, health care cuts across lines of class, race, nationality, age, gender and political bent, and has the potential to either unite or polarize, to inspire or enrage. As well as being highly political, health care is also deeply personal, affecting each of us at the most fundamental level of our existence.
