Feminist Advocacy and Gender Equity in the Anglophone Caribbean by Michelle V. Rowley

Author:Michelle V. Rowley [Rowley, Michelle V.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Women's Studies, Gender Studies, Science, Earth Sciences, Geography
ISBN: 9781136839450
Google: Q5HVogUqqYUC
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-05-13T04:46:43+00:00

Table 4.4 Maternal Mortality Rates, Trinidad and Tobago (1991–2001)

* * *

Year

Maternal Mortality

* * *

1991

49.18

1992

60.70

1993

66.40

1994

76.2

1995

67.5

1996

38.9

1997

70.4

1998

44.7

1999

38.2

2001

70.4

* * *

Source: Aziza Ahmed/Dawn Steering Committee, Adapted from Republic of Trinidad & Tobago, Central Statistical Office, Population and Vital Statistics Report, 1999 and CEDAW Report, 91.

In this regard, the St. Lucian context highlights one of the ways in which women's issues become caught in the institutional quagmire of apolitical system. In September 2004, the St. Lucian government, headed by Kenny Anthony, introduced Clause 166 of the Criminal Code. This revised the existing law to allow St. Lucian women access to an abortion under certain conditions, i.e., rape, incest, or the health of the mother. This in practice made St. Lucia no different from St. Kitts and Nevis, Jamaica (broad health grounds), or Trinidad and Tobago (mother's life at risk). For all practicality, unless a woman could prove (with a police report) that she had been subject to one of these unfortunate scenarios, securing an abortion remained illegal.

One would not think this to be the case, though, with the furor that subsequently unfolded in this predominantly Catholic population.35 On September 16, 2004, the bill was read in the House of Representatives. Ten days later, approximately 2,500 citizens protested plans to amend the code that, for all intents and purposes, did not aim to legalize terminations. At the forefront of the march was a young female Minister of Government responsible for the Ministry of Gender and Home Affairs, Sarah Flood-Beaubrun. She was pregnant, and she opposed the Bill. During the debate of the bill, the then Minister with responsibility for Gender and Home Affairs Flood-Beaubrun voiced her dissenting view by calling the Members of Parliament “murderers” and “child killers.” It was reported that, in her opposing speech, she used the terms “murderers” and “child-killers” no less than 32 times (The Star January 23, 2003). She was subsequently dismissed (January 2004) and has since resigned from the St. Lucia Labour Party (March 24, 2004).

The St. Lucia case, like Trinidad and Tobago's, presents clearly the ways in which critical gender mainstreaming concerns are often locked in a quagmire of state politics. However, St. Lucia's case introduces an additional complexity, where the possibility of mainstreaming reproductive equity for women is blocked by the deliberate opposition from the person with central responsibility for such processes. A juxtaposition of Miller's and Beaubraun's work toward the passage of reproductive rights legislation prompts us to revisit the transformative potential of effective “femocrats.” Eisenstein's discussion of femocrats as women who are powerful “in government administration, with an ideological and political commitment to feminism” can only be cautiously applied to the Caribbean because there it is not a given that these women will have an ideological commitment to feminism or that they will represent power within government. In addition to this, the two scenarios suggest the need to question the logic of mainstreaming, which as yet does not adequately call for a policy and planning distinction between a femocrat's ethical and moral locations. St Lucia's case, therefore,

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