Kristin Burnett – författare

The buffalo hunter, the medicine man, and the missionary continue to dominate the history of the North American west, even though historians have recognized women's role as both colonizer and colonized since the 1980s.Kristin Burnett helps to correct this imbalance by investigating the convergence of Aboriginal and settler therapeutic regimes in the Treaty 7 region from the perspective of women. Although the imperial eye focused on medicine men, Aboriginal women played important roles as healers and caregivers, and the knowledge and healing work of both Aboriginal and settler women brought them into contact. But as settlement increased and the colonial regime hardened, informal encounters in domestic spaces gave way to more formal, one-sided interactions in settler-run hospitals and nursing stations.By revealing Aboriginal and settler women's contributions to the development of health care in southern Alberta, Taking Medicine challenges traditional understandings of colonial medicine and nursing in the contact zone.

When Henry Morgentaler, Canada's best-known abortion rights advocate, died in 2013, activists and scholars began to reassess the state of abortion in this country. In Abortion, some of the foremost researchers in Canada challenge current thinking by revealing the discrepancy between what people are experiencing on the ground and what people believe the law to be after the 1988 Morgentaler decision.Grouped into four themes – History, Experience, Politics, and Reproductive Justice – these essays showcase new theoretical frameworks and approaches from law, history, medicine, women's studies, and political science as they document the diversity of abortion experiences across the country, from those of Indigenous women in the pre-Morgentaler era to a lack of access in the age of so-called decriminalization.Together, the contributors make a case for shifting the debate from abortion rights to reproductive justice and caution against focusing on "choice" or medicalization without understanding the broader context of why and when people seek out abortions.

This multidisciplinary volume investigates different abortion and reproductive practices across time, space, geography, national boundaries, and cultures.