How much do you know about women's health or human rights? How much do you know about medicine on the international scene? The answers are sure to vary, but Professor of Health Education Dr. Chrystyna Kosarchyn is sure to be able to fill in the blanks. On Wednesday, April 4 in Greenwood Library, room 209, Kosarchyn presented "Women's Health and Human Rights: A Global Perspective." Associate Professor of Sociology Dr. Carl Riden introduced the presentation by first advertising the Yellowstone class that she instructs along with several other professors. She then spoke of the Women's and Gender Studies department.
Afterwards, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Dr. Naomi Johnson came forward to speak about women's health as part of the current national debate and international politics, and thereby introducing the speaker, Kosarchyn. On an overhead projector, Kosarchyn displayed a copy of "A prayer for the Girl Child," a poem that concerns the issues faced by girls across the world such as nutrition and not being a sex slave.
She brought the issue home a little more with a thinking exercise. In this thinking exercise, a young girl in the Philippines named Maria finds an egg in her family's chicken coop. Kosarchyn asked, "Who eats the egg?" Those in the audience were given several choices. Should the egg be sold involving a process including a middleman who often takes his cut of how much the egg will fetch at market? Should Maria's father, a worker at the local banana plantation, eat the egg?
He is the family's provider, and the healthier he is, the healthier the family is. Should her school-age brother and sister eat it? They need the nutrition to learn. Should the mother eat the egg? Should Maria? Should the infant girl of the family eat the egg? Or should they all share the protein in one of the mother's dishes? Though the question could have many answers, Kosarchyn revealed the reality of female members of the family probably not getting the egg.
In fact, Kosarchyn said that being a female is often dangerous to a person's health, especially if they are born in a developing country. Several examples were given, including one of an Indian woman Sunseeta who chose to abort her female child in favor of a male. Another example was that of a Pakistani woman named Sarah who died because her husband did not authorize her acceptance into a hospital.
Others included a Guatemalan woman named Carmen who died during her abortion and a woman named Elizabeth in South Africa who was forced for economic reasons to have sex with an HIV positive man, thereafter contracting the disease. After the presentation, Kosarchyn was available to talk about the subject a little more. Talking about how she organized the presentation, Koarsrchyn said, "I was talking to Dr. Johnson once about a meeting that I couldn't attend but I wanted to come to, and she told me to just talk at the meeting.
So, we got together and started kicking around ideas and this one came up, which is something obviously associated with the sexes and the genders." Explaining that her doctorate course work was in international health, Kosarchyn also said, "I think that gender and equality has been an issue that has been improving. Particularly with globalization, microcredit programs for women to start their own businesses [and] the fact that cultures are more accepting of women's education.
But I think in other countries, not just in the developing world, those differences still exist, though I think they are more stark in the developing countries." Many of the problems with women's health internationally she connected to developing or low-income countries and their inability to provide sufficient education. Kosarchyn said, "Countries that have less education rely more on tradition than what education can provide ... So when you have a society like that with women less educated, more subjected, you deal with traditions like them being told who to marry. In educated societies, you find more economic opportunities and higher status for women. That's one of the things that come with development."
One of Kosarchyn's students, Kaylin Grainger, said that she "learned about all the different struggles women have to face in developing countries. They have to go through social, mental and physical health struggles throughout their entire lives. Also, Dr. Kosarchyn gave us an excellent list of sites so that we may be able to bring awareness to these issues."
Grainger also said that she loves "how [Kosarchyn] teaches from power points, and she talks more in detail about what is being presented in the power point. I learned several things in her Women's Health presentation and have learned so much more in her World Health Issues class." When asked whether she has become more concerned about international women's health than she was before, Grainger said, "It made me open my eyes to what was going on in other countries.
Compared to the inequality of women in developing countries, here in the United States we have it so well. After listening to all the problems these women face, I want to spread the word to bring awareness to these issues in hopes of stopping them."
