Women's Health expert Lorraine Greaves details the innovative, courageous, and creative activism of the “second wave” women’s health movement in Canada between 1960 and 2010. This activism (re)claimed women’s bodies, created women-centered spaces and services, and challenged the medical model. Feminists challenged diagnoses, treatments, laws, policies and research, as well as the care women were offered and the way they saw their bodies and themselves. Legions of women, and a few men, made changes ranging from abortion rights to preserving women’s hospitals, to the legalization of midwifery to requiring gendered health research—changes that resonate today.

Lorraine Greaves is the Executive Director of the Health System Strategy Division in the Ministry of Health and Long Term Care in Ontario. She was formerly Executive Director of the British Columbia Centre of Excellence for Women’s Health (BCCEWH) and the Director, Women's Health Research Development at BC Women's Hospital and Health Centre. She is also a Clinical Professor in the Faculty of Medicine at UBC. Her research focuses on girls` and women's addictions and substance use with a particular interest in substance use during pregnancy and tobacco use among girls and women. As a founding Co-Leader of the WHRN, she lead the development of the surveillance node and produced a gendered data directory tool which will improve access to data sources for researchers interested in advancing women's health in BC.

Lorraine Greaves' profile page