113 © Te Author(s) 2020
M. Turshen, Women’s Health Movements,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9467-6_4
4
Fighting for Good Health Services,
Struggling with the Pharmaceutical
Industry
All over the world women are fghting for good health services and strug-
gling with the pharmaceutical industry. Tis chapter describes a critical
moment in women’s health movements when women turn from organiz-
ing around discrete issues to consider the health system as a whole and to
formulate demands for a health system that is responsive to all of their
needs. Te objective of the chapter is to show how women have sufered
from both health policy associated with neoliberal globalization and the
commercialization of health care.
1
A second aim is to describe the ways
women’s groups have contested worldwide trends and transformed the
provision of health care since the 1980s. Te emphasis in the frst part of
the chapter is on the key dimensions of health services that determine the
extent of equity: access, cost, and the range and quality of services avail-
able to women of diferent genders, classes/castes, races, and ethnicities.
In addition to the basic issue of primary health care provision, the chap-
ter also deals briefy with the specifc problems of health services for
women under difcult conditions—in wartime and in prison. Te phar-
maceutical industry and issues of research on women’s health comprise
the focus of the second part of the chapter. Sexual and reproductive
health care is discussed in Chap. 6.