feminist health psychology

Looking Beyond “Good” and “Bad” Care: Using Feminist Relational Discourse Analysis in the Emergency Department

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Written by Bella van Hattum and Tracy Morison

Photo by Feng Sun on Unsplash

Emergency Departments (EDs) are often the first point of care for people experiencing pain and/or bleeding (a threatened miscarriage) in early pregnancy. Many patients present at the ED not simply with physical symptoms, but also with an emotional emergency that encompasses the fear, uncertainty and moral significance of potential pregnancy loss. Their care needs extend well beyond biomedical assessment. From the perspective of emergency healthcare providers, a threatened miscarriage is generally a low clinical priority, even if a patient shows distress. This mismatch between patient and healthcare provider perspectives can create complex challenges for both parties in systems designed to prioritise acute, life-threatening risk. 

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From wandering wombs to reproductive control: Why women’s health was never (and is never) neutral

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Written by Emily Young

Sexism in contemporary healthcare is often framed as a modern problem, stemming from a lack of training or insufficient research attention to women’s health. While these explanations are not wrong, they are incomplete. From a critical health psychology perspective, the marginalisation of women’s bodies is not an accident of modern medicine, but a feature of its foundations. The patriarchal logic that shapes how women’s bodies are understood, viewed, and governed today are embedded in the historical origins of Western medicine.

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Abortion Accompaniment as Reproductive Justice: Rethinking Care on the Island of Ireland

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Written by Anna Theresa Schmid

Photo by Diva Plavalaguna on Pexels

What image comes to mind when you hear the word “abortion”? Maybe it’s a woman staring at a positive pregnancy test, devastated. Or someone walking through protestors toward a clinic, face hidden from cameras. Maybe a sterile doctor’s office – fluorescent lights, silence. All of these images have a common thread: it’s a bleak situation, where the person at the centre is utterly alone.

Moving away from individualistic understandings of abortion

Particularly in Western societies, we tend to understand abortion as a private issue and rarely think about it as a shared experience. The dominant view of healthcare, and abortion in particular, is a deeply individualised one, focused on personal responsibility and medical authority. Across other parts of the world, though, and especially in Latin America, communal practices of abortion care have a long tradition, recently also becoming more present in research. For example, feminist groups in the region have shown how abortion accompaniment enables self-managed abortion in restrictive settings, transforming abortion care to be rooted in empathy and solidarity (Belfrage, 2024; Larrea & Veldhuis, 2025).

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In between feminist and critical health psychology: Finding myself, fitting in, and flailing

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By Andrea LaMarre

Photo by Alex Hamilton. Karamatura Track in the Waitakere Ranges

This blog post has been adapted from one of Andrea’s presentation at ISCHP’s 12 Biennial Conference in September 2021. Andrea was one of the recipients of the emerging researcher award.

When I consider the question of what a feminist health psychology is, I can’t help but think of myself, wandering between disciplines and literatures, trying to find a place where I feel at home. I think about a young Andrea who, despite having embodied so many privileges, felt like her emotions were too much for everyone. I think about how shrinking myself and trying to please everyone have been strategies I’ve adopted to fit into societal ideas about who I should be. I think about how in graduate school, I began to embrace a louder, more outspoken feminism that encourages emotion, sensation, and commitment to filter through and drive what I do. I think about the theorists and scholars who taught me that being critical, and being feminist, might mean seeping outside of boundaries—corporeally, theoretically, methodologically.

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