Dunn / Leeson Health & Welfare Poster Project

"Thin Edge of the Wedge", and "If Doctors were the ones who had our babies..."
Syntax organized this project to provide local action groups with an opportunity to express their views regarding health and welfare issues in Alberta. The project was facilitated by Loraine Leeson and Peter Dunn of London, England. Dunn and Leeson are artists working in Tower Hamlets, a docklands community. They had been involved in promoting opposition to hospital closures.

Participants included a midwife and representative of the Calgary Association of Parents and Professionals for Safe Alternatives in Childbirth and a psychiatric nurse working in family counseling at a Calgary hospital.

Albertans are faced with an insidious erosion of their basic health care rights by the Conservative government through a trend towards the privatization of health services. The government's first step in this direction came with an announcement of extra billing costs to patients for selected medical services. (1984)

If doctors were the ones who had our babies...
This poster lists and illustrates the various interventions practiced as a matter of routine by a male-dominated obstetrics profession. North American birthing practice assumes an interventionist approach which treats childbirth as an "illness" to be "cured" rather than a natural, organic process.

The text below the tray of instruments lists their frequency of use. (1984)