Immigrant Women’s Health Service Needs To Be Cut

A mobile sexual health service for immigrant women in Toronto is at risk with upcoming budget cuts. In addition to healthcare the operation also offers translators in nine different languages. This service, which seems highly secretive and backstreet to me, has been in operation for 20 years. I find it unbelievable that it is only after suggested budget cuts that this service has been scrutinized. Perhaps it is time for some remodelling.

Friesen claims women using the service are “poor, lack health coverage and for reasons of work, transportation or cultural restrictions within the family have trouble getting medical care.”

Very well, but how can these problems be rectified without the aid of a Winnebago?

Lack of health coverage in Canada, provided you are legally permitted to live and work, should not be an issue that a few phone calls and a bit of paperwork can not sort out. As far as transportation is concerned, Toronto has buses and an underground system which offer means of affordable transit. Walking, cycling, taxis and driving for those without a vehicle make it hard for me to see how transport could be a concern.

Women having cultural restrictions opens a rather large can of worms. If women feel they cannot go to their family doctor there are other services which provide sexual health care. The Sexual Health Clinic in Toronto offers care for both refugees and the poverty-stricken seeking birth control. If girls feel they need to hide their need or desire for reproductive health services a bus is not going to address the real matter at hand. Many young Muslim women, for example, feel they have to seek care in secret. This may be due to the changing views of modern Muslim people. Whether this is right or wrong religiously speaking, it is, in fact, an increasingly common issue. An issue which then makes the need for the mobile health service too high.

The program coordinator, Ayesha Adhami, expressed concerns about the potential decrease in funding. “Do we cut staffing for Farsi speaking women or for the Afro-Caribbean women? Those are the kinds of choices we face.”

Immigrants — whether refugee or other — are not legally required, at any point, to learn English or French upon departure for or arrival in Canada. Not speaking the native language of a country I was planning to immigrate to seems impossible to me. Unless of course there are other communities of people speaking my mother tongue already living there. Many who don’t speak the national language either.  Learning a new language is difficult but surely a small task to complete in order to seek refuge from a life or war and poverty.

The government even offers free services such as English Language Services for Adults for people in these situations. By helping people help themselves it would, if nothing else, eliminate the need for medical translators. I cannot see any negative result in learning English or French if people from other countries wish to settle in Canada.

The mobile sexual health service should be eliminated and the money used on solving the roots of the need for it in the first place. In 2012 in a modern westernized country women should not have to seek any essential need from a van.

Contact the author here: lacey@morningquickie.com