Public Health Mom    
 
 
She wants everyone to be healthy. I am a public health professional and the mother of three children. My entrée to the field of public health was facilitated by my fluency in French. In 1987, after receiving a Master of Arts degree in French Studies from New York University, I joined an international reproductive health training organization as a bilingual program assistant. Encouraged by my physician husband and inspired by the memory of my scientist father, I went on to earn a Master of Public Health degree from the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health (now the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health). For the next five years I worked in maternal and child health in (mostly) Francophone Africa, before moving to Chicago and working in local and national public health advocacy and policy development. When my second pregnancy (with twins) sent me on a two-month in-hospital bed rest “sabbatical,” I took some time out. But within a year I was back at work, this time at the School of the Public Health at the University of Illinois at Chicago. After the grant I was working on ran out, I decided to spend more time with my school-age children and on my writing and teaching. Public health practice focuses on prevention and interventions aimed at populations versus individuals. Some, especially in these United States, may view public health as custodial or patriarchical. The essence of motherhood is also about prevention and protection, but it is best expressed through nurturing and making wise decisions on behalf your children, in the hopes of developing wise, healthy, and, eventually, autonomous people and good citizens. If the beginning of my career was a dovetailing of my French skills and my public health education, this chapter represents my desire to blend my skills and identity as a mother with my training and experience in public health. It is through the combined optics of public health and motherhood that I propose “Public Health Mom,” a place to post my published essays, photos and your musings and mine, hopefully to stimulate an active discussion of issues of public health, politics, motherhood and fatherhood.
With Dr. C. Everett Koop, (U.S. Surgeon General from 1982-1989) in 2007;  a family in the Masai Mara, Kenya ; a family in Chicago c. 2003;  in my father’s arms, c. 1964.
 
Photo credits: Sam Solish, MD (Dr. Koop & me); Judith (lions); David Bentley (family); Marcia Weinstein (Dad and me).
Judith A. Weinstein:  Public Health Mom