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With an aim to investigate the recent state of the feminist clinics and their negotiation of medical authority in a time of increased technoscientific biomedicalization, and capitalistic health-care system, I conducted a study of two feminist health centers in the Northeast of the United States in 2001–2002. In this chapter, I discuss how the two centers (a nonprofit collective and a for-profit center with a more hierarchical structure) negotiated medical authority in organizational terms as impacted by the larger context of medicine and its interaction with the state, capitalist health-care system, and antiabortion forces. The chapter concludes with a discussion of demedicalization as a multilevel process and implications for feminist care (service delivery) and U.S. Women's Health Movement.

This chapter provides an introduction to Volume 29, Health-Care Delivery and Reform: Roles of Patients and Providers. This chapter discusses the topic of health-care systems and health-care reform from an American perspective and also focuses on the roles of patients and providers and how recent sociological literature examines some of these issues. It also serves as an introduction to the volume. It explains the organization of the volume and briefly comments on each of the chapters included in the volume.