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Women's Studies Journal

Women's Studies Journal
2010 - 24:2

Contents and abstracts

Editorial
Sue Jackson and Ann Weatherall, p.1
Articles
The 'unfortunate experiment' and the Cartwright Inquiry, twenty years on: why getting it right matters
Anne Else, pp.2-7
Patient centred ethics, the Cartwright Inquiry and feminism: Identifying the central fallacy in Linda Bryder, A History of the ‘Unfortunate Experiment’ at National Women’s Hospital (2009, 2010)
Phillida Bunkle, pp.8-24
Abstract: The Cartwright Report was published by the New Zealand government in 1988. It presented the findings and recommendations of a judicial inquiry into allegations that women with cervical carcinoma in situ had been untreated or under-treated in the course of medical research at national Women’s Hospital. The allegations arose in an article called ‘An Un fortunate experiment at National Women’s Hospital’ authored by Phillida Bunkle and Sandra Coney. The recommendations included through reform of medical and research ethics. These popular reforms are usually regarded as feminist achievements and significant ethical millstones. A book by Professor Linda Bryder published internationally in 2009 and 2010 questions the reality of the ‘experiment’, the findings of the Cartwright inquiry and argues that the recommendations made little contribution to changes already underway within medicine. This article draws on the records of the inquiry, particularly the case histories of the women involved to refute Linda Bryder’s arguments.
One for the girls?: Cervical cancer prevention and the introduction of the HPV vaccine in Aotearoa New Zealand
Christy Parker, pp.25-39
Abstract: This article presents a critical feminist perspective on New Zealand’s HPV immunisation programme. The programme, delivering the HPV vaccine to young women, has been progressively rolled out since September 2008 and heralded as a major development in cervical cancer prevention and women’s health more generally. However, the programme has also been the subject of fierce debate, for both its context and the strategies used in its implementation. Women’s health advocacy groups have been highly critical of aspects of the programme’s implementation. Concerns have included the gendering of sexual health responsibility by targeting the vaccine only at young women; the disregard of consumer rights to informed choice and consent in the marketing of the programme; and the failure to integrate the programme with the National Cervical Screening Programme which risks undermining the life saving success of cervical screening in New Zealand. This article demonstrates the importance of careful and consultative programme planning and decision making to ensure population health policies deliver the best health outcomes to women. There are lessons to be learned from New Zealand’s approach to introducing the HPV vaccine which demonstrate the continued importance of the contribution of critical gender erspectives in the development of health policy more generally.
Phenomenological sociology and the sociology of bioethics: two New Zealand studies
Rhonda Shaw and Sarah Donovan, pp. 40-53
Abstract: This article addresses several issues raised by social scientists regarding the contribution of sociological research to bioethics, the activities of bioethicists themselves in the social construction of bioethical concerns, and the relationship between the public and bioethicists in establishing and maintaining public trust in medical and scientific research. The primary aim of the article is to demonstrate the value of social science research that investigates peoples’ lived experience of modern biomedicine and innovative technology for bioethical debate. In order to do this, we offer snapshots of our research undertaken with New Zealanders from two separate studies respectively informed by phenomenology and the sociology of bioethics. The first study, which focuses on how people experience their self-identity and embodiment in organ donation and transplantation processes as fundamentally intersubjective and social, suggests why phenomenology should be incorporated into contemporary bioethical approaches deliberating issues about the body. The second study, which examines the value of lay perspectives in public engagement with bioethics, draws on research about women’s decision-making regarding prenatal screening, to offer critical comment on bioethics as a social, cultural, and intellectual event
Cultural safety: Nurses’ accounts of negotiating the order of things
Fran Richardson and Lesley MacGibbon, pp. 54-65
Abstract: Cultural Safety is a significant nursing discourse in the nursing education curriculum in Aotearoa New Zealand. However, when nurses graduate and begin working in different practice settings it is only one of several competing discourses they negotiate in their daily practice. Cultural Safety, which is based on privileging the knowledge of the person who is being cared for, becomes a point of conflict within an environment where discourses of traditional nursing care and medicine compete. In this paper we examine how power relations are played out in practice settings by registered nurses who at times struggle to implement cultural safety knowledge in their work practices.
Student Research Reports
Mother blaming; or autism, gender and science
Hilary Stace, pp. 66-70
Strategies for Survival: Old(er) Women’s Management of Resources
Isobel Munro, pp. 71-75
Book Reviews

Sex work matters: Exploring money, power and intimacy in the sex industry,
Melissa Hope Ditmore, Antonia Levy and Alys Willman (eds)
Reviewed by Gillian Abel, pp. 76-79

Mad or bad? The life and exploits of Amy Bock 1859-1943,
Jenny Coleman
Reviewed by Alison J. Laurie, pp. 80-81

Women’s Studies Journal, Volume 24 Number 2, December 2010. ISSN 1173-6615