• Taking birth back home

  There is a new confidence emerging among pregnant women in this country, a confidence which demands more of health professionals in terms of the individual attention given to women throughout their pregnancies, in labour and in post-natal care. p
  

• Taking old age seriously

  ON a recent Tuesday afternoon in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the queue rapidly lengthening outside the Brattle Theatre seemed likely to spill over into Harvard Square. There were more women than men waiting for the doors to open at 5.30 p.m. Most either had white hair or were skilfully disguising it. They swapped stories: how a mother's stroke had cost them job promotion; how a father's colon cancer had drained a savings account. All expected author and psychologist Mary Pipher, the Brattle's guest speaker that evening, to provide, if not answers to their family problems, then at least clues. "She explained my adolescent daughter tome," one woman joked, sipping coffee. "After that, I'll trust her on anything." p
  

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