Second Opinion

This is a collection of essays on women, health, and reproduction, written over the past fifteen years. They cover such topics as menstruation (and myths about it), abortion, the new birth technology, contraception (Depo-provera and the Dalkon Shield), and selective non-treatment on carcinoma-in-situ at National Women's Hospital, Auckland, where a world authority on cervical cancer conducted a twenty-year experiment on selective treatment, in which a quarter of the women in the untreated sample progressed to invasive cancer, and some of them died. None of the women were aware that they were not being treated. The essay provoked a storm of controversy when it was published, which has not yet died down.