Gita Sen is the director of the Centre for Public Policy and Sir Ratan Tata Chair Professor at the Indian Institute of
Management in Bangalore, India, and an adjunct professor at the School of Public Health at Harvard University. Sen begins her
presentation by stating that we have "simultaneous concerns with infectious diseases that haven't been dealt with" and new ones that are
resurging, as well as "chronic diseases that are reaching epidemic proportion." These concerns have resulted in turmoil in some
countries because of the difficulty of prioritizing the allocation of money. Sen also mentions the problems of maternal mortality and
unsafe abortion, "the solving of which has very little to do, in fact, with natural science anymore. . . and a great deal to do with
social science and politics."
Sen states that the ICPD represented a broadening of the field along a number of different dimensions, most critically
in the area of human rights: "Population went from being what it had been. . . the movement up or down of human numbers. . . down to the
social perspective and the behavioral perspective." Placing these technical issues within their social context was a social movement and
an important transformation. In this movement, gender, gender equality, and male responsibility all became central issues.
These changes enriched a field that had formerly been narrow and technical, and they posed significant challenges. The
first of these challenges was funding and the question of where money would come from to move the field forward. "This is a serious and
very important issue, caught up with the larger question of the ways in which health itself receives priority or is funded," says Sen.
The second issue is that of global politics, and the question of what this politics is really about. States Sen, "I
believe. . . that it's not about abortion. . . it's a politics about gender and gender equality." The gender wars were simply displaced
to a different level, but the debate is truly centered on these issues. Sen argues that the politics surrounding abortion are about
"denying the premise of gender equality at its most fundamental level. . . . This is a war that we're going to have to fight socially,
politically, and in every way that we can, and the reproductive health field is absolutely caught in the middle of this war."
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