Synopsis "A Public Health Journey: My Quest to Provide Permanent Contraception"
Description of: A Public Health Journey My quest to provide voluntary contraception. The struggle for reproductive health, and the right of individuals to make permanent decisions about their own bodies, has been a long one. This book chronicles many aspects of this shift in societal attitudes, from the post-war era of puritanical repression, through the sexual revolution, to what we believe now to be a more enlightened age. The author of the book, a registered nurse who fought her own battles before there was any public support, was on the forefront of these changes. The first part of the book is a broad history of the organization now called EngenderHealth, Inc. It covers the period from the mid 60's through the mid 90's, reporting from the view of an insider what the organization was doing to broaden reproductive choices for both men and women. The book begins at the time when hospital policies refused tubal ligations for mothers with fewer than five or six children, when there was no public funding or insurance coverage for the surgery, when there were no out-patient facilities, and when female surgical contraception required a long abdominal incision. Gonzales describes how the organization, in their attempts to achieve sexual and gender equality, fought to permit young, single, or child-free persons to choose surgical contraception, if they were fully aware of the permanency of the method. It also fought to allow women to obtain a contraceptive sterilization in the absence of spousal consent, ensuring that women and their reproductive organs were no longer a man's possession. The book demonstrates the organization's efforts to develop counseling and informed consent procedures, to establish vasectomy clinics, to encourage surgeons to perform simpler, out-patient procedures for women and to teach the "no-scalpel" vasectomy technique to urologists, medical schools and medical students. The second part of the book follows the author as she represented the Medical Division of the association overseas once the battles in the United States had been won. Experiences of her many trips to less-developed areas of Asia, Central and South America, the Indian subcontinent, and sub-Saharan Africa are colorfully related.
