Can a National Women’s Health Framework address your health inequities?

In December 2025, Senator Danièle Henkel introduced Bill S-243, legislation establishing the first comprehensive national framework for women’s health in Canada. The bill represents a watershed moment for health advocacy, mandating the federal government to develop coordinated strategies addressing long-standing gender disparities in healthcare access and outcomes.

For Caribbean Canadian women and girls, this legislative milestone carries particular significance, offering a critical opportunity to address health inequities rendered invisible by a healthcare system that has historically failed to collect data disaggregated by race and ethnicity.

Caribbean women experience significant health disparities shaped by a high burden of non-communicable diseases such as: diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease, alongside persistent reproductive health challenges including elevated maternal mortality and greater risks from violence against women, all exacerbated by social determinants like poverty and gender roles, according to recent data from PAHO, WHO, OECD and regional studies.

For instance, studies have shown Caribbean women to be 65% more likely to have diabetes and three times as likely to be obese as men, and within the Caribbean region women struggle with high maternal mortality rates (e.g., 88 per 100,000 in 2020), reflecting the combined effects of economic inequality, gendered caregiving roles, and uneven access to quality healthcare. These patterns are not uniform, as Caribbean women are racially, ethnically and culturally diverse, including Afro-Caribbean, Indo-Caribbean, Chinese-Caribbean, and other communities, yet they point to shared structural conditions that shape women’s health across the region.

Within the Canadian context, health disparities often surface through data reported on Black women, in part because Caribbean women have historically made up a significant proportion of Canada’s Black population, particularly through women-led migration from the Caribbean beginning in the 1960s. While Black women in Canada are not exclusively Caribbean and the Black population has become increasingly diverse with growing African immigration, existing research shows that Black women experience disproportionately high rates of adverse maternal health outcomes, including preterm birth, preeclampsia, gestational diabetes, perinatal mortality, and are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications linked to hypertension.

Although these findings are especially relevant for Afro-Caribbean Canadian women, they highlight the limitations of race-only data and the need for ethnicity-based disaggregation that can distinguish Caribbean-Canadian women’s experiences from those of other Black populations to truly reflect their lived realities and their families navigating healthcare systems shaped by systemic barriers. The continued absence of robust, disaggregated data on Black and other racialized women in Canada exposes a critical health research gap, one that allows preventable harm to persist without adequate recognition, accountability, or policy response.

Understanding these disparities requires an intersectional lens recognizing how race, gender, and socioeconomic status interact to shape health outcomes, as overlapping systems of discrimination create unique experiences of marginalization. For Caribbean Canadian women, health is shaped by gender bias in medical practice, anti-(Black) racism in healthcare settings, xenophobia, linguistic barriers, economic precarity from immigration and care work, and chronic stress navigating a historically colonial society. If this national framework fails to adopt an intersectional, anti-racist lens will inevitably reproduce the inequities it purports to address.

Bill S-243 mandates targeted solutions for populations that experience structural health inequities, including racialized women, and requires strategies to strengthen healthcare professional training. The calls for strengthened primary care and preventive health services, and mandates consultation with provincial and territorial governments, Indigenous peoples, and civil-society partners. Most critically, the bill’s focus could enable the collection of disaggregated health data, exposing racial and ethnic inequities that are currently masked by current aggregate reporting.

Yet, we are reminded that legislation alone does not guarantee equality, or equity. The implementation will depend upon whether provincial political representatives and policymakers commit to centring the voices of Caribbean Canadian women, investing in community-based research, training healthcare professionals on structural and social determinants of health, and establishing accountability mechanisms ensuring progress is measured transparently.

The hope is Caribbean Canadian women and other diverse groups of women will continue to actively participate in shaping this national framework. Our diverse expertise, grounded in lived experience and professional knowledge, is essential to ensuring that policies, and bills, like Bill S-243, translates into tangible improvements in our health and well-being.

Perhaps, what is required is a continued effort for a fundamental restructuring or shift within our Canadian healthcare systems to reduce fragmentation of care and persist with actively centring community and equity with committed resources to ensure all women, particularly those historically and contemporarily excluded from health research and policy, can achieve optimal health. Canada’s future depends on whether health equity is treated as a structural obligation rather than a rhetorical goal.