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At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2002

Balancing breastfeeding and paid employment: a project targeting employers, women and workplaces.

Since breastfeeding is acknowledged as the best nutrition for young babies, it needs to be protected, supported and promoted. This includes enabling mothers to continue breastfeeding even when they return to work. This paper describes a project that promotes balancing breastfeeding and paid work through the development, distribution, promotion and evaluation of suitable materials to workplaces, employers and women in Australia. Information provided in a workplace kit was based on previous successful strategies from published works in refereed journals and in consultation with employers, employees and other key people. Information for employees was further summarized and translated into Arabic, Chinese, Turkish, Spanish and Vietnamese. Over 50,000 information kits were distributed Australia-wide using a database that comprised contact details of medium to large workplaces plus employee and employer organizations, with preference given to workplaces that employed women of childbearing age and women from diverse cultural backgrounds. The translated material was also distributed to migrant resource centres and working women's centres around Australia. Promotion of the project was extensive, resulting in 20 newspaper articles, 17 radio interviews or news items, and articles in 18 newsletters and professional journals and three magazines. The project was also promoted at three conferences and one seminar. Evaluation (directed at employers) focused primarily on the distribution and content of the information kit, since the evaluation was conducted soon after distribution. The evaluation survey was sent to 1571 valid contacts (808 e-mail addresses, 1360 fax numbers). The response rate was 12.8% (n = 202). Seventy per cent of responding businesses rated the information kit as excellent. Over half anticipated the kit would be useful in their organization, while over two-thirds agreed that the kit provided sufficient information and suitable solutions to support balancing breastfeeding and work in their organization. While this project has achieved its objectives, further work is required to assist organizations to develop and implement policies and procedures for balancing breastfeeding and work, so that breastfeeding mothers who are returning to work can continue to breastfeed as long as they and their baby require it.

Attitude to Health↗
PubMed1997

Population control II: The population establishment today.

Although population assistance represents a relatively small share of official development assistance, it influences many other aspects of development planning. The organizations that comprise the population establishment have a common purpose--the reduction of population growth in the Third World--but they are not homogeneous and sometimes have conflicting goals and strategies. National governments, multilateral agencies, nongovernmental organizations, foundations, academic centers, and pressure groups all contribute to creating and sustaining what has become a virtual population control industry. Through scholarships, travel grants, awards, and favorable publicity, Third World elites have been encouraged to join the population establishment. The World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the U.N. Fund for Population Activities have pursued explicit strategies for pressuring Third World governments to design and implement population policies, most recently in Africa.

Coercion↗
PubMed2000

International actors and population policies in India, with special reference to contraceptive policies.

The international population policy agenda has traditionally been dominated by demographically driven population control policies. However, in the population policy development that preceded the International Conference on Population and Development in 1994, people's reproductive needs and rights received more emphasis. The aim of this study was to analyze how the new emphasis in population policies has been interpreted at the country level. In analyzing population policy rhetoric and its practical interpretations in India in 1994, the authors found that the rhetoric was broadening to encompass women's empowerment and reproductive health and that the use of direct method-specific monetary incentives and disincentives for accepting family planning methods was disapproved. However, population policy options were still considered mainly in terms of their ability to reduce fertility. Furthermore, the increased emphasis on the general market agenda was more important than that on reproductive needs and rights in molding population policies, as was evident in the greater stress on cost-recovery systems and nongovernmental actors. The findings suggest that the broader agenda for population policies and reproductive rights has been interpreted so that it can serve the aims of population-growth control and be implemented in the context of more market-oriented social policies and trade liberalization.

Contraception↗
PubMed2000

From maternity to parental leave policies: women's health, employment, and child and family well-being.

Pregnancy and maternity are increasingly viewed as social as well as individual risks that require health protection, employment protection and security, and protection against temporary loss of income. Begun more than a century ago in Germany, paid and job-protected maternity leaves from work were established in most countries initially out of concern for maternal and child physical health. Beginning in the 1960s, these policies have expanded to cover paternity and parental leaves following childbirth and adoption as well. Moreover, they have increasingly emerged as central to the emotional and psychological well-being of children as well as to the employment and economic security of their mothers and fathers. They are modest social policies, but are clearly an essential part of any country's child and family policy. No industrialized country today can be without such provision, and the United States is a distinct laggard in these developments.

Child Welfare↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Population policy forum. Men, the Church, and pleasure.

I applaud Marge Berer's initial proposal on feminist population police, demonstrating that feminists are capable of construction as well as criticism. Such creative efforts, while partial, are what keep the conversation going and us in it. Several points deserve to be highlighted as they point toward much needed changes in public policy. One is the need to shift the overwhelming burden of reproduction from women alone to society in general and men in particular. This is not to give an inch on women;s moral agency and primary decision making. To the contrary, it is to insist that male birth control be an integral part of all population policies in action as well as in regulations. Rates of tubal ligations and vasectomies in most countries show that women assume more than a fair share, men doing comparative little. Another important element is the role of religion as a shaper of social policy, the Catholic church worldwide being the prime example of how sex education, birth control, and abortion are regulated as much be theology as by law. Feminist s ignore this reality in our peril, though dealing head on with it, as some religious professions have found out, is also dangerous. The fact that the majority of women of childbearing age in the US ignore the church's pronouncements and use contraception shows that the ideological strangle hold is slipping. We can loosen it further. A related, though perhaps less politically correct, concern in such a feminist proposal is the place of sexual pleasure for its own sake. While public policy is not typically concerned with such matters, education is needed for women to feel entitled to separate sex from procreation, to enjoy the full range of sexual activities for which reproduction is but 1 possible outcome. This, after all, is a major feminist achievement that deserves to made available without delay]

Americas↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Population policy forum. Women as subjects, not objects.

I very much agree with Marge Berer that feminists must recognize that there needs to be a population policy, worldwide and country by country, that encourages lower birth rates and that it is essential to start talking about population policies that respect and promote women's moral agency. Indeed I think it would be fair to say that the failure to respect and promote women's moral agency is the major reason why government-sponsored population policies have failed in the past. Male population planners habitually think of mass population as objects, rather than subjects, of population policy. This is why they think so readily of "incentives" or even more coercive methods. Birth control is thought of as a "war" to be imposed on the population, not as an integral part of the self-development of the people's own capacity to organize and become decisionmakers. If this is true in relation to the male population, it is even more so in relation to women. Population policy continues the basic male approach to women as bodies under their control, not as self-actualizing subjects. Until population policies take as their starting point women's human development as persons and moral agents in their own right, such policies both will be abusive to women and also will not "work." However, Marge Berer's remarks about oppressive, dehumanizing governments as incapable of promoting any other form of population policy give one pause. If this is the case, then neither national governments nor most international agencies linked to Western hegemonic neocolonialism can be the authentic promoters of feminist population policy. There must be a global effort to build parallel women's health organizations that work on the grassroots level with women, especially poor women, to empower these women themselves to become the leaders in educational and economic development of the women in their communities. Only in and through this larger context can such women both learn how to use and become empowered to use methods of birth control.

Behavior↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Population policy forum. Redefining survival.

Although I agree with most of the content and the essence of Marge Berer's excellent paper, I beg to differ with her on whether there is a need for a feminist population policy. If we advocate respect for women's needs and right, then we have to believe that women will want to regulate and limit their fertility when it is no longer an essential element in their survival: today, childbearing is a social or economic necessity for many women, even to the detriment of their health. No set numbers should be designated as the ideal family size, nor should any form of ideal family be posed in the 1st place. However, there is an issue of pragmatism or opportunity value that we have to consider. Women need contraceptives to regulate their fertility, among the many other things they need to empower themselves. Those who control economic resources at both the national and international levels are more interested in investing in family planning programs than in other health or development needs. We will not be able to change their motives to some abstract egalitarianism in which they never believed. Our challenge, as feminists, is to develop our own capabilities in 2 ways. One is to gain the technical and intellectual know-how to make a clearer argument that demonstrates the link between effective contraceptive use and addressing women's reproductive health and other economic and social needs. We must convince a reluctant establishment that without empowering women they will not achieve their goals. The 2nd is to create our own organizations and modes of operation that will allow resources to flow into programs and activities that will work for women and not get marginalized and impoverished into paralysis.

Contraception↗