Self-help is a process of taking back control over our health and over our bodies.

There is absolutely no reason why pregnancy, childbirth, contraception and sexuality - all the subjects most intimate to us - should be left to men (who in any case don't understand much about these things), to scientists who carry out their dubious experiments on our insides, or to the pharmaceutical industry which has become adept at making an enormous profit out of women - the number one consumer. 

Self-help is concerned with understanding the way our bodies work, what our vaginas and our cervixes look like, in order to keep a check on ourselves and to avoid crises. Self-help is an apprenticeship, the discovery of how to heal and look after ourselves in a way which suits each of us best, through our experimenting with each other. 

The self-help movement in the United States and Western Europe has given birth to many interesting alternatives such as new treatment of vaginal infections (e.g. garlic for trichomonas; yoghurt for yeast infection ... ), the rediscovery of home births, and especially the opening of women-run health centres. This has happened in the USA, Italy, France, Switzerland and West Germany. These alternatives are first of all an answer to our needs, but they also give us power against the medical establishment which is one of the pillars of the profit-making system. By knowing our bodies better and by going in groups to the doctor, we become stronger and more able to obtain what we want. 

At the same time, if the struggles of women workers within the medical institution go beyond demands for salary increases and reduced working hours to include questions of power and division of responsibility, they can begin to stipulate their own working conditions. 

If consumers and health workers join together in attacking the power held by the medical establishment, it will finally crack I (feminist hope).

The many self-help groups which have been set up over the past decade have frequently gone through similar stages, beginning with self-examination and continuing by opening an alternative women's health centre. 

The description of the development of one such European group is perhaps the best way to show what is meant by an approach which has two aims : to build an  alternative, and to put pressure on the medical establishment in order to get what we want.

I am conscious that this evolution is perhaps more characteristic of the developed countries, but I hope that the experience will at least give ideas to women elsewhere in the movement. 

Five years ago, we saw women practicing self-examination for the first time. There were about 250 of us in the room with the "stars" of the North American movement. It was a real demonstration. We were very impressed but the speculums we bought there stayed on our shelves gathering dust for over a year. During that year we got to know the MLAC (movement for the  liberalization of abortion and contraception) in France and we saw abortion using aspiration performed by non-medical women - something which encouraged us to continue our struggle for free abortion on demand.

The self-help clinic and the women's health movement are not just personal solutions for an individual women's health problem - though that is obviously a valid reason for their existence : they are tools for inducing collective thought and action from which radical social change can grow. 

Helen Marieskind
"Helping oneself to Health",
Social Policy, Sept/Oct. 1976

One evening we met specifically to do self-examination together. It took us hours to overcome our shyness, and finally laugh at all the excuses we had given before to avoid doing it. It was late. We gathered round the fire to undress in order to examine our breasts, our bodies, our vaginas and our clitorises. Using the speculum to examine yourself internally is only one part of the process. There was a kind of explosion in the group, which I have only experienced since with groups of women doing self-examination for the first time. 

We met several times like this before we were confronted with a new problem : after our great discovery, we didn't know how to continue . Finally, we went on more systematically to observe each day of our cycle, to examine vaginal secretions under the microscope, and later to do menstrual extraction (vacuum aspiration of periods). 

For us, this process was a long one since we were also involved in a series of public actions against the women's hospital (called "maternity" here), against the private practice of gynaecology, and against power in general (something which is perhaps characteristic of a European group).

Through actions such as occupying the hospital, or demonstrations, we have obtained:

• abortions performed with local anaesthetic (up to eight weeks) including a considerable reduction in price;
• the abolition of the commission of experts which used to decide whether or not a non-national woman was entitled to an abortion.

We have pushed for childbirth without medication, but this is a continuing struggle, except when performed at home, of course. We have also compiled a commentated address list of all the gynaecologists practicing in town, based on women's own experiences with them. 

Five years after our first self-examination, we have now opened a women's health centre, to deal with everything related to gynaecology, obstetrics and pediatrics. This is how one group, in the middle of Europe (Geneva, Switzerland) has developed. The story is told here to show the importance of self-help.

Obviously the fact of opening a health centre "for women, run by women" does not in itself guarantee a political character. The politics of alternatives becomes clear only through the way such a centre is run, and especially the way in which decisions are taken and the way money is dealt with. 

What is important today is not to prove that we can open alternative health centres but to ensure that they remain places where different working relationships can develop. They must not become imitations of already established institutions by, for instance, being seduced by profit, having a hierarchy of salaries and workers, and by practicing established medicine. 

Rina, June 1978