MNÁwesome: What Happens When We Legalise Abortion?

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If you follow me (or probably any other Irish person) (or read Irish news) (or are passingly aware of when Ireland makes foreign headlines), you probably heard that the Republic of Ireland voted last month to repeal the 8th Amendment of the Irish Constitution (Bunreacht na hÉireann). It was a massive, multiyear campaign that took off running after the tragic—and completely preventable—death of Irish dentist Savita Halappanavar.

I know that this topic is hard for many people and that there are a lot of very strong emotions. As a devout Roman Catholic, I’m familiar with both sides of the issue. I’m not going to dig into the intricacies of the philosophy on when life begins, but I will say this: I desperately wish that I lived in a world without abortion. I wish that I lived in a world in which every pregnancy was planned and healthy and no one ever had to make the decision whether to terminate their pregnancy. I wish I lived in that world, but it doesn’t exist. It is not my place to tell someone else what they need to do with their body and in no other instance do we insist that it is.

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Medicines and Vaccines Part 2: Bringing Essential Medicines to Market

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In our last piece, we talked about the pharmaceutical development pipeline and how some drugs are repurposed from other medicines, rather than being discovered as a new medicine completely. In this post I’ll talk about what that pipeline looks like for antibiotics and vaccines, two of the most important types of medicines that we have. 

Vaccines and antibiotics, like all medications, are very expensive to produce (as we discussed in Part 1), but they can’t be sold for the same high prices as nonessential (think Viagra) medications. This creates a problem for the development pipeline: how can companies afford to take risks on new development for products that won’t cover the cost of producing them? The answer was surprising for me when I first started studying public health. 

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A Tale of Two Cities: What's Happening in Cascadia?

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I've always been fascinated how the United States, despite being so advanced and spending so much on healthcare, can still rank so lowly in health outcomes. When I talk to friends and family in the UK, Canada, or Ireland about our healthcare, they're often baffled at how our system runs. "You send the ambulance away? But why?" "Because it costs $500 and I can drive myself for much less." My son's birth was uncomplicated and I delivered him myself in the hospital's bathroom, but received a $35,000 bill for the trouble. One of my cousins delivered her baby a couple of weeks later in Northern Ireland, received excellent care, and never saw a bill for the process because healthcare there doesn't have a fee-at-point-of-service model. She didn't have to get "pre-authorization" to birth her baby because that isn't a thing. Her health insurance company didn't say her unborn child couldn't be insured because he didn't have a birthday yet because that is absolutely ludicrous. 

We know that health and healthcare are different (though related) things, but what are the outcomes of such different social policy landscapes on the health of the people that live there? Do government social policies really make for better health? Let's discuss! 

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