Review of Alicia Ely Yamin, Power, Suffering, and the Struggle for Dignity: Human Rights Frameworks for Health and Why They Matter (University of Pennsylvania Press),” Medical Law Review 25, no. 2 (2017): 352-355.

Abstract

As the feminist adage goes, ‘the personal is political’. In the same vein, Alicia Ely Yamin opens her book with two stirring personal anecdotes—her grandmother’s protracted labour that left forceps scars on her mother’s forehead, and her own miscarriage. These stories foreground her life devoted to advancing sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) as an academic and activist. The book itself, according to Yamin, was birthed in anger and indignation over the countless preventable deaths of women and girls especially from the Global South (p xii). In Power, Suffering and the Struggle for Dignity, the many personal encounters Yamin shares as part of a long career in health and human rights attest to the global inequalities that significantly constrain individual life chances...