Impact of Integrated Family Planning Training (original) (raw)
Related papers
American, British and Canadian Studies, 2022
Although abortion was legalized in 1973 through the US Supreme Court's landmark decision in Roe v. Wade, it is state legislatures that have ultimately acted as the final arbiters on the matter ever since. As a result, only over the course of the last decade, more than two hundred abortion restrictions have been enacted nationwide in the United States. As more and more restrictions are put in place in an attempt at policing women's bodies, the practice that came to be known somewhat inappropriately as 'abortion tourism' is becoming increasingly common. More and more women travel across state lines in order to benefit from a safe procedure while evading the legal limits imposed upon them in their home states. This is even more acutely so in the case of young, under-age women, as only a few states do not have parental consent statutes covering abortion provisions. It is against this background that my article discusses two recent movies which tackle the issue of teen pregnancy and 'abortion mobility,' Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020) and Unpregnant (2020). I look at how both travel narratives illustrate, in different genres and manners, the hurdles (young) women have to navigate to gain access to necessary medical care and expose the state-sanctioned obstacles to abortion in two stories about female friendship and empathy above all.
2000
Press and Cole's work extends bravely into several realms of analysis within sociology and beyond, from the politico-ideological struggles which surround abortion, to the complex ways in which women formulate their own individual postures within the abortion debate, to yet more broadly interdisciplinary questions about how audiences negotiate their interpretations of media output. In view of their ultimate focus upon the ways in which non-activist women of different class and racial groups connect abortion to the exercise of power over women's lives and to their overall political consciousness, illustrated by women's responses to televisual portrayals of abortion, the book should be of great appeal not only to those specifically interested in the abortion debate, yet also to anyone generally interested in class relations, feminism and gender studies, and/or the relationship between media production and ideological reproduction. The authors call upon their respective experiences in communication studies, psychology, and women's studies to produce a most exceptionally multi-dimensional, richly textured, and remarkably well-integrated analysis which offers rare insights into a variety of questions. Indeed, the abortion issue could be crudely seen as almost incidental to the analysis: it so happens that women's discussions of abortion serve to very effectively expose their awareness of the linkages between public and private spheres. As Press and Cole discovered early in their research, " the issue is a prism through which general discussions of power and authority in our society ... are refracted both in media representations and among those who receive them " (19). By means of focus group interviews conducted with American women throughout the period 1989-1993, the authors ambitiously explore the intersections between class, gender, and race in the responses of their subjects to depictions of the abortion issue in three selected prime-time television dramas. Press and Cole argue that televisual representations of abortion are powerfully class-based, such that television characters who seek abortions are predominantly working class or extremely poor. Yet another opportunity to expose and explain differences in women's general ideological perspectives thereby arises, and it is thoroughly pursued. The focus groups are differentiated according to their pro-choice or pro-life positions, and further subdivided according to their class locations, specific occupations, religious affiliations, and race. Television is understood to be one medium through which personal and group identities are constructed, through which political and moral values are formulated, and but one of a vast array of continuous discourses through which beliefs and opinions are developed. Media scholars will likely also be delighted to see that oppositional and resistant readings of the television programmes are anticipated from the outset; in fact, expectations of active and critical viewership are intrinsic to the parameters of the project and form the basis of the methodological strategy. These expectations follow from Press's earlier work, Women Watching Television: Gender, Class, and Generation in the American Television Experience (1991). Pro-life women, for example, are found to habitually watch, and often enjoy, television entertainment which regularly contradicts their most fundamental values. These women expressed commonalities in both their views about abortion and their general responses to the television programmes, commonalities which even cut across class lines. Their views about abortion related to a deeply entrenched resistance to the assumptions of the secular mainstream media in the contemporary
Gender Questions, Volume 2 (1) pp.12-34, 2014
Drawing on the examination of five feature films, including Twilight: Breaking Dawn – Part 1, and more than half-a-dozen popular television programmes, including Parenthood, The L Word and The Secret Life of the American Teenager, this work argues that dominant cultural representations foster a narrow and potentially damaging, disempowering and dehumanising depiction of childbirth. Together these works foster a dominant conceptualisation and representation of childbirth that narrowly represents childbirth, emphasising themes including ‘bitter birth’ or birth as affliction, a reproductive double bind affirming women’s fundamental procreative role while also pathologising their reproductive processes, and the trivialisation of women’s birthing agency through the broad failure to recognize maternal magnificence. This work further argues that dominant representations of maternity pervading mass media, as indicated in the examined examples, normalise patriarchal gender roles, particularly emphasised femininity, and mark gender noncomformists as deviant. The promotion of such norms is clear in contemporary cultural depictions of childbirth, including birth-related hit films such as Knocked Up and The Back-up Plan. In the last of these an important component of patriarchal gender codes is further shown to include heternormativity. Keywords: birth, dualism, feminist, gender, maternal magnificence, medicalisation of birth, patriarchy, trivialisation of birth