Health Policy in a Time of Crisis ─ Abortion, Austerity, and Access

This timely book examines a fundamental international issue in health care access: the gap between codified policy—including health laws that guarantee access to particular kinds of health care as a human right, right of citizenship, or right of residence—and the actual ability of people to receive the supposedly guaranteed health services. The author-draws on her extensive fieldwork at an abortion clinic in Catalonia, Spain, to reveal the diverse problems women, and other marginalized people, face in seeking health-care services;-examines the larger political-economic and cultural contexts of Catalonian society to show how women can and do overcome obstacles;-using the ethnography of the abortion clinic, analyzes the impact of economic crisis, and the resulting shifts in cultural and political identities, on women’s and providers’ perceptions of proper access to public health services;-looks beyond Spain—to Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere—to the global problem regarding the delivery of health care to powerless peoples.

Bayla Ostrach is an Assistant Professor of Family Medicine at the School of Medicine, Boston University and a Fellow of the Society of Family Planning. An Applied Medical Anthropologist by training, her research aims to prompt changes in policy and practice