Re-emerging issues still to be addressed, says Dame Billie
WHILE giving some background into the gains seen over the years and the legislative changes which formed a part of her lifework over the past four decades, Ambassador at Large and Plenipotentiary Dame Billie Miller expressed concern that some of the worrying issues affecting women in the past, are still here in the 21st century and must be tackled.
She was speaking during a Women Share Conference hosted yesterday by the High Commission of Canada in collaboration with the Sagicor Cave Hill School of Business & Management Inc., yesterday morning.
Dame Billie who was elected to parliament back in 1976, noted that she would have to wait 18 years under the next set of females would join her in the House of Assembly. These included [now] Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley, whom Dame Billie noted she mentored from the time she was 15 years old. The other was Elizabeth Thompson, now the Ambassador to the United Nations.
The retired politician lamented that to date there are still issues of gender equality as well as maternal and infant mortality and morbidity affecting both developed and developing countries.
According to Dame Billie, “Women do deliver and not only babies. All over the world. We deliver fire wood, we deliver water, we deliver children to school, water, clean, in today’s world, you name it and women can, will and do deliver. That’s who we are.”
“Gender equality continues to be under severe threat in many of the same old and often different ways. Everywhere in the world, both developed and developing... For those of us who have toiled in this vineyard, many times in the past it is going to mean rolling up our sleeves and starting over again and again as we have in the past many decades.”
“The politics of it is well known to us. I had hoped that in the new century, a new millennium that the health and rights of women and girls would have been enlarged. Now strategies are being designed to reverse the gains of the 20th strategy as we speak. It is very hard to accept that in both the developed and developing world infant and maternal morbidity and mortality are in reverse. And especially in the process of pregnancy and delivery I have difficulty with this.”
Dame Billie made a clarion call to the ladies in attendance to step forward in this fight. “We can do this ladies. It is what has to be done that we do. So the ball is in our courts again. I had hoped that we would have been going forward at a pace in the 21st century but now we have to backtrack to recover ground lost,” she said. (JH)