After reading the articles for both Thursday and Tuesding, along with watching the documentary in class, the biggest problem women suffer from in medical experimentation is being uninformed. Doctors promote their products such as vaccines and sterilization without telling the women about the consequences. By not acknowledging the fine print, women find themselves in situations as presented by the "Natural Laboratories" article because of the over zealous doctors. For the first page and a half I squirmed in my seat reading about how women had their eyes scraped thinking that they had a serious eye disease to later find out that this was not that case and consequently losing their vision. Theresa Brown says that these procedures were "forced on 'them' " they had no choice. Similar to the women in the documentary who underwent sterilization, they were presented no other options, there was only one path to take in order to control the population or control the disease.
These situations greatly differ from the men in the documentary who when asked if they would be sterilized refused to undergo the procedure. Even when told that the procedure was less invasive and painful like the women's sterilization process, the men still did not accept the proposition. It is ridiculous that men think there is a difference between how a man views their masculinity and how women view their femininity and ability to give produce children. The men were given a choice while the women were not. The men also contributed nothing in attempts to conquer the over population of Puerto Rico. How does it become solely the woman's job to fix this.
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I, too, am struggling with the gender issues that surfaced in the movie that we watched this week in class. Throughout the course of this whole semester we have seen how women are viewed as the lesser of two halves in many societies around the world. This seems as though it may never change.
Alice brings up a good point in the very last sentence of her post. She mentions how we always expect women to "fix" the problems that arise. But, how we can this possibly be? In many cultures, women are viewed as inferior to men, and thus less powerful. When women are placed in this position it is even harder for them to make changes. It makes me think of the women's movement in America and struggles that many of the courageous women faced during the course of this century. It was such a struggle here that I can only imagine the difficulty in other places where there are predominant paradigms, such as religion and biased political structure. We must realize that it is hard to much even the smallest of changes in some cultures.
Lastly, Alice brings up another very important issue when she brings up the idea of misinformation or people being uninformed. We have tried to fix this problem in our own country with government rules and regulations (i.e. IRB), but part of me thinks that it will never be enough to help minority groups. If they are always at a disadvantage, how are they to know when something "wrong" is happening? I wish that Americans, as well as other around the world, learn to take greater responsibility for their actions and the actions of those around them.
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