I have to confess, I’m extremely bad about helping people get elected. I will write blog posts and letters to elected officials all day long, but have not historically been very active in either donating to candidates/causes or taking actions like canvassing on their behalf. This year, taking in-person action might be even more difficult due to living car-free, but I’m alarmed enough by the apparent uptick in anti-choice legislative activity that I think I need to do better and more.

I’m also going to need to focus some of that attention more specifically at the local level. It seems somewhat easier to get the word out about national threats, and there’s a bigger pool of people who can raise objections. So many serious effects on choice happen at the state level, though. This is where waiting periods, forced ultrasounds, forced delivery of medically inaccurate warnings, and other unnecessary restrictions happen.

In my own state of Tennessee, a bills is in a subcommittee to require any abortions past “viability” to occur in a hospital. There’s also a bill to move up the effective date of a law that would forbid the use of telemedicine for abortion. An obvious question is “how do you do surgery without your hands on a patient?” The answer is that this is already being researched and done for other surgeries.

But what we’re really talking about for abortion right now is something more like having a videoconference, with a patient who is getting a medication abortion, and using that technology to talk to them about their wishes and consent, how to properly take the medicine, and any potential complications to watch out for. It’s something a doctor or nurse practitioner can do from any connected location, potentially having other nurses, medical students, etc. do any needed vital sign checking and form-signing in person. It’s something that’s considered very safe.

It’s something that could really help women in rural/remote locations, and across states with few abortion providers, by increasing the geographic range a provider might be able to reach. In some states, a single provider has been known to fly in from out of state one day a week; telemedicine could seriously relieve this logistical problem and relieve provider shortages for the cases in which medication abortion is appropriate and desired.

And the state legislature is the place to prevent it, if you don’t want providers using new technologies to provide women with increased access to legal medical care.

The bill to forbid telemedicine for abortion in Tennessee passed last year. I pay attention to these things, and I’m pretty sure I missed it. And now they’re trying to make it take effect this year instead of next year.

They’re making it illegal for your physician, if he or she thinks it’s appropriate, to advise you on taking a pill via a videoconference. Where you can talk to and see one another, and your provider can use her/his judgment about your care while talking with you. And it’s only abortion that is being targeted; nobody is trying to forbid providers from delivering other legal care in this way.

So, Tennessee, can we start here? Let’s make sure the bill to move up this interference doesn’t pass, and then we can see what we can do about getting rid of the original, and supporting in real ways politicians who stand against such nonsense.

See my Blog for Choice day posts going back to 2007, and NARAL’s list of participating blogs for this year.

Participate in the Virtual March for Trust Women Week – Think reproductive rights are an important human right? Sign on to the virtual march to send a pro-choice message. More than 9,000 people already have.

Webinar: New Report on Breast Cancer and the Environment – Breast Cancer Action is holding a couple of webinars next week to talk about the IOM’s recent report on breast cancer and the environment.

See also Ayesha and Judy’s Can We Choose to Move Forward on Reproductive Justice? And How? and get details from Christine on how you can help a midwife get to Haiti to help with obstetric emergency preparedness – an interview with the midwife is provided.

Tennessee does not allow transgender people to have their birth certificates changed, so if the bill were passed, there would actually be no legal bathrooms for transgender men and women to use in any state government building. (It’s unclear to me whether this might also apply to other public restrooms in non-governmental buildings)

Practical people have noted other problems with this bill. It would be impossible to enforce, because there is no chance we’re going to set up checks outside of restrooms. It could hypothetically criminalize parents who need to take a child into a restroom, other caregivers in similar situations, maintenance workers, and others.

But let’s be clear – mom taking her male-appearing son into a women’s restroom is not the target of this bill. Transgender men and women are, because of the small-minded bigotry of Floyd and others like him.

To make that point perfectly clear, Floyd said this, clearly illustrating his bullshit fears and hatred of transgender women:

I believe if I was standing at a dressing room and my wife or one of my daughters was in the dressing room and a man tried to go in there — I don’t care if he thinks he’s a woman and tries on clothes with them in there — I’d just try to stomp a mudhole in him and then stomp him dry.

You know, because transgender women are really all predators out to harm cis women, a belief Floyd emphasized by continuing, “Now if somebody thinks he’s a woman and he’s a man and wants to try on women’s clothes, let them him take them into the men’s bathroom or dressing room. Don’t ask me to adjust to their perverted way of thinking and put my family at risk.”

This is not a secret email remark made by Floyd. It’s not a comment he thought was off-the-record, between friends. This is what he said on-the-record, for public consumption.

So, Chattanooga, who are you going to run against this asshole this year? And if this nonsense is not quickly withdrawn or defeated, who wants to go pee in the “wrong” bathrooms in the state capitol building with me?

[Note: it looks like the Senate version of the bill has already been withdrawn after public reaction began; it could potentially be reintroduced by someone else, and Floyd's House bill remains. Here's Floyd's contact information if you'd like to let him know what you think of him and his bill.]

Introduced by California’s Darrell Issa and New York’s Carolyn Maloney, the bill would prevent the government from requiring that papers resulting from taxpayer-funded research be deposited online for free access to those taxpayers. In other words, it’s meant to protect the income streams of publishers, even when that income is derived from publishing the results of research studies funded by the government, works that should logically belong in part to the U.S. people who paid for them.

Practically, if passed, this bill would reverse the huge strides made in recent years for taxpayer access to federally funded medical research. A few years ago, it became a requirement that papers reporting results from research funded by the federal National Institutes of Health be deposited online in PubMed Central for free access. Because a huge amount of U.S. medical research is NIH-funded, this has meant that many articles about research affecting the public’s healthcare have become freely available online to that public that paid for it.

This NIH Public Access Policy generously gave publishers a one-year grace period for each article, meaning that any person, library, researcher, or even state and federally-funded institutions needing access to the most current research findings would still have to pay the publisher for access to those articles.

This is apparently not enough of the pie for publishers, who have fought for years against such taxpayer access. The Association of American Publishers is lobbying hard for this restrictive new bill, claiming public access policies are unwarranted interference with the private sector. Not surprisingly, one of Rep. Maloney’s top donors is Reed Elsevier, an AAP member and perhaps the biggest publisher of medical research (with $1.6 billion in profit in 2010) through its Elsevier division.

Find your Representative and her/his contact information and send a message at https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtml. Several societies (such as the American Medical Association and American Nurses Association) and university presses are also members of the AAP – if you’re a member of these organizations or affiliated with a university whose press belongs to the AAP, you might also contact them to express your opposition.

It’s not just scientists who should oppose this legislation – it’s patients, educators, librarians, providers, and caregivers – anyone who believes that when the government funds medical research ultimately for better knowledge about people’s bodies and how to treat them, those people should be able to access that information. Write your Rep today.

Some other useful posts I liked on this topic:

• Elsevier-funded NY Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney Wants to Deny Americans Access to Taxpayer Funded Research – Michael Eisen at It Is Not Junk
• Why Is Open-Internet Champion Darrell Issa Supporting an Attack on Open Science? – Rebecca Rosen at The Atlantic
• Raising the barriers: restricting access to scientific literature will hurt STEM education – Sandra Porter at Discovering Biology in a Digital World at ScienceBlogs
• The Research Works Act: asking the public to pay twice for scientific knowledge – Janet Stemwedel at Scientific American’s Doing Good Science
• Scientists, Fight For Access! – Kevin Zelnio at Scientific American’s EvoEcoLab
• Why does the University of California Press support reactionary legislation opposing public access to scientific research? – Michael Eisen at The Berkeley Blog
• Calling on Publishers to Resign from The Association of American Publishers Re Anti-Open Access Stance, and YHGTBFKM: Ecological Society of America letter regarding #OpenAccess is disturbing – Jonathan Eisen at The Tree of Life
• And for even more, check this roundup from John Dupuis of ScienceBlogs, Around the Web: Some posts on The Research Works Act (Updated!), at Confessions of a Science Librarian

Filed under: Access, Rights, & Choice, Government, Libraryland ]]> http://womenshealthnews.wordpress.com/2012/01/08/contact-your-representative-in-opposition-to-the-research-works-act/feed/ 1 Rachel http://womenshealthnews.wordpress.com/2011/12/29/state-of-the-blog-2011/ http://womenshealthnews.wordpress.com/2011/12/29/state-of-the-blog-2011/#comments Thu, 29 Dec 2011 16:55:23 +0000 Rachel http://womenshealthnews.wordpress.com/?p=5835 ]]> I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how I want to work on this blog going forward – and obviously I’ve been thinking about that more than I’ve actually been posting here. Women’s Health News has been around since May 2005, and has always focused on women’s health – but tending to focus on reproductive health and rights, and always with my own kind of feminist take on the politics. The last several years have provided plenty of fodder in that area – the constant churn of anti-woman, anti-choice attacks is a source of material, but it’s also somewhat tiring. Just when you think you’re getting somewhere, things get Sebeliused.

The question is, what do I want to get out of it, and am I getting that out of it now, more than 5 years in. I’ve never been doing this for recognition, or to spin into a book deal, or to take over my own corner of some feminist/repro rights blogging empire. I get an amount of traffic I’m happy with. I get fewer comments than I’d like, and wonder about how useful long form stuff or pointing people to important information is when people can get everything, everywhere, in short snippets – or at least feel like they do.

I get some good things out of this – I’ve met a lot of great people, I get to practice forming arguments or compiling information and writing about them in a coherent way, and it forces me to always, always, keep reading and learning.

I’m unwilling and unable to do the kind of constant cross-commenting and link promotion and building stables of bloggers and community bloggers and contests and so on that seems to be part of the slick blogging machine these days.

I don’t know, I think I’m just looking at the new year, and deciding that I either need to stop worrying about not posting some poorly-defined “enough,” or put in the work to post more. I’d like more comments in a click/reshare age, but I’m not sure we’re going back there without more work than I’m willing to put in on building commenters just for the sake of it.

Is it enough to put information out there and hope it’s useful to someone who sees it when they need it? I’m a librarian – you’d think I’d have a firm answer on that subject.


Filed under: Miscellaneous ]]> http://womenshealthnews.wordpress.com/2011/12/29/state-of-the-blog-2011/feed/ 8 Rachel http://womenshealthnews.wordpress.com/2011/12/10/evidence-trampled-by-politics-sebelius-overrides-fda-decision-on-otc-emergency-contraception/ http://womenshealthnews.wordpress.com/2011/12/10/evidence-trampled-by-politics-sebelius-overrides-fda-decision-on-otc-emergency-contraception/#comments Sat, 10 Dec 2011 14:29:10 +0000 Rachel http://womenshealthnews.wordpress.com/?p=5808 ]]> [Originally posted at Our Bodies Our Blog. Speaking of, did you know the OBOS 40th anniversary edition book is one of Library Journal's Best Books for 2011 in the consumer health category?]

This week, Health and Human Services head Kathleen Sebelius interfered with the FDA’s decision that emergency contraception could safely be made available over the counter (OTC) without a prescription to women and girls of all ages.

The drug is already available without a prescription for women 17 and older, after years of political wrangling. Advocates have worked to ensure OTC access because emergency contraception is most effective when used as soon as possible, and time, distance, money, and privacy can be serious barriers to getting a prescription and obtaining the drug in time to prevent pregnancy.

The FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) had completed a review of the issue and concluded that Plan B One-Step emergency contraception should be available OTC to younger women, which Commissioner Margaret Hamburg explains:

Based on the information submitted to the agency, CDER determined that the product was safe and effective in adolescent females, that adolescent females understood the product was not for routine use, and that the product would not protect them against sexually transmitted diseases. Additionally, the data supported a finding that adolescent females could use Plan B One-Step properly without the intervention of a healthcare provider…CDER experts, including obstetrician/gynecologists and pediatricians, reviewed the totality of the data and agreed that it met the regulatory standard for a nonprescription drug and that Plan B One-Step should be approved for all females of child-bearing potential.

That’s when Sebelius stepped in and blocked the findings of CDER from taking effect. In her letter [PDF] overruling the FDA’s findings, Sebelius objected that “The label comprehension and actual use studies submitted to the FDA do not include data on all ages for which the drug would be approved and available over-the-counter.”

That data is not available for the vast majority of over-the-counter drugs on sale to all age groups without a prescription. Many OTC drugs (like acetominophen and aspirin) can have serious, even fatal, effects if taken inappropriately because of deliberate misuse or misunderstanding the label and instructions. You will not find data on safety and label comprehension for every possible age group for these medicines, yet they are readily available OTC in adult doses to consumers of any age.

Former FDA official Susan Wood – who resigned after a previous round of political interference in emergency contraception – agrees:

“They don’t do this for pain medication, headache medication, cold medication,” she said. “That’s not part of how we assess products. Are we going to go and now do this with all products, or are contraceptives once again being singled out for this special treatment and this extra standard when we’re talking about a very safe and very effective product that can really help women?”

Change.org has a petition up urging Sebelius not to let politics trump science, and objecting to the HHS leader’s focus on very young girls who may access the drug:

The fact that the HHS and the Secretary are focusing on this extremely young age group is bizarre. Less than 1% of 11 year olds are sexually active, where over half of adolescents have had sex before their 17th birthday.

This decision is illogical and unfounded. Physicians around the country agree that Plan B is incredibly safe and effective for all ages, helping to decrease the number of unintended pregnancies.

Further reading:
This NPR coverage provides a succinct timeline and political explanation of the controversy over accessibility of emergency contraception.

Statement from Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health stating that the Obama administration’s “put[ting] politics before science and responsible health policy…is appalling.”

Heather Corinna at Scarleteen urges young people to speak up in protest of this action.

Jodi Jacobson at RH Reality Check, who reminds us that the previous administration wasn’t the only one playing political games with reproductive rights:

…no amount of proof it seems can make up for the fact that, despite all the evidence, even President Obama and Secretary Sebelius appear to think young women are too stupid to make their own decisions or that they are just chum to be thrown to the religious right in an election year. As the saying goes, with friends like these, who needs the far right?

Added: Email the White House directly.

Also see Emily Douglas’s great piece for The Nation, which takes on the paternalistic BS of Obama’s response. Finally, see Susan Wood’s excellent piece in the Washington Post, where she writes:

The president should stand by the principles of scientific integrity and restore science to its rightful place. He should support the FDA commissioner and direct the secretary to allow the agency to do its job. By doing so he will fulfill the promise of that beautiful day in March 2009 when he pledged that science would trump politics, not the other way around.

.


Filed under: Access, Rights, & Choice, Adolescent Health, Contraception, Drugs, Ethics, Government, Women's Health ]]> http://womenshealthnews.wordpress.com/2011/12/10/evidence-trampled-by-politics-sebelius-overrides-fda-decision-on-otc-emergency-contraception/feed/ 2 Rachel http://womenshealthnews.wordpress.com/2011/11/27/sunday-news-round-up-back-to-the-grind-edition/ http://womenshealthnews.wordpress.com/2011/11/27/sunday-news-round-up-back-to-the-grind-edition/#comments Sun, 27 Nov 2011 19:00:14 +0000 Rachel http://womenshealthnews.wordpress.com/?p=5755 ]]> A few things that have caught my attention over the last couple of weeks:

Over at Nature, which is *supposed* to be a respectable publication, Ed Rybicki wrote some utter unfunny bullshit in Parallel Processing, in which men hunt, women gather, and HA HA, WOMEN are so good at SHOPPING because they can ACCESS A PARALLEL UNIVERSE. Because of how women and men are just so inherently different in a binary, unknowable-to-men way. LOLLERSKATES. Christie Wilcox over at Scientific American’s Science Sushi has the more mature response.

At another Scientific American blog, Kate Clancy talks about menstrual synchrony and why women might not really synchronize their cycles.

Rock Center has a segment on involuntary sterilization in North Carolina that disproportionately targeted women of color.

Health News Reviews takes a look at media coverage of a study on preventive mastectomy.

The draft research review for Closing the Quality Gap Series: Quality Improvement Interventions to Address Health Disparities is online (free) and open to public comment through Dec 15. (via BHIC)

eeshap at the Crunk Feminist Collective writes about diamonds and conflict, and why care in purchasing is not enough – we must make choices that devalue the diamond in society and therefore reduce diamond mining-related incentives to cruelty.

A clear photographic example of the way products for children reinforce gendered steretypes, in the form of magnetic words for boys and girls. Here, boys get the moon, a wizard, and a dragon, while girls get a diamond, perfume, and make-up. Oh, and bunnies.

Lena Chen has a guide to/review of some sex toys. The separate files for this article are totally unwieldy, but there is some good info therein.

I haven’t spent much time on the site yet, but here is the inevitable OccupyHealthcare. One thing they’re talking about is health information and responsibility for health literacy.

Jill Filipovic talks at the Guardian about the long game for personhood amendments.

The FDA revoked its approval of Avastin for metastatic breast cancer treatment.

Kotex has recalled a whole bunch of tampons.


Filed under: Access, Rights, & Choice, Cancer, Drugs, Miscellaneous, News Round-Ups, Sex & Sex Education ]]> http://womenshealthnews.wordpress.com/2011/11/27/sunday-news-round-up-back-to-the-grind-edition/feed/ 0 Rachel http://womenshealthnews.wordpress.com/2011/11/27/in-which-im-an-irrepressible-optimist-about-obama-birth-control-and-those-bishops/ http://womenshealthnews.wordpress.com/2011/11/27/in-which-im-an-irrepressible-optimist-about-obama-birth-control-and-those-bishops/#comments Sun, 27 Nov 2011 17:48:34 +0000 Rachel http://womenshealthnews.wordpress.com/?p=5775 ]]> Over the last couple of weeks, many women’s health, feminist, and reproductive rights-oriented organizations have been running campaigns and articles urging people to contact the White House to preserve the no-cost coverage of birth control as part of the preventive services covered under the Affordable Care Act.

I understand why they’re worried.

The Roman Catholic Bishops met with the President, and one of them came away saying, “I left there feeling a bit more at peace about this issue than when I entered.” The big worry, and what people are supposedly hearing, is that Obama might back off on birth control coverage requirements, and that’s why the Bishops feel better now.

Obviously this would be a bad thing and would generally piss me off.

Now let’s take a few minutes for optimism:

The CDC released its 2008 abortion surveillance data. These reports are full of info on who has abortions at how many weeks of pregnancy and after how many previous live births, but I want to highlight this rather long Public Health Implications section of the Discussion. I’ve removed reference numbers, added some breaks for ease of reading, and bolded some key points (see the original):

According to the most recent national estimates, nearly one fifth of all pregnancies in the United States end in abortion. Multiple social, cultural, economic, and political factors are known to influence the incidence of abortion: the availability of abortion providers; the adoption of state regulations, such as mandatory waiting periods and parental involvement laws; increasing acceptance of nonmarital childbearing; shifts in the racial/ethnic composition of the U.S. population; and changes in the economy and the resulting impact on fertility preferences and access to health-care services, including contraception.

However, in spite of these multiple influences, efforts to reduce the incidence of abortion need to focus on preventing unintended pregnancy. Indeed, nearly all abortions are preceded by an unintended pregnancy, with most recent estimates suggesting that intended pregnancies account for <5% of all abortions, including those which presumably are performed for maternal medical indications and fetal abnormalities. Providing women with the knowledge and resources necessary to make decisions about their sexual behavior and use of contraception can help them avoid unintended pregnancies. However, efforts to reduce unintended pregnancy in the United States have been challenging. Findings from the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), the primary national source of data on unintended pregnancy in the United States, suggest that unintended pregnancy decreased during 1982–1995 in conjunction with an increase in contraceptive use among women at risk for unintended pregnancy. However, data from the 2002 and 2006–2008 NSFGs suggest that no additional improvements have occurred: contraceptive use among women at risk for unintended pregnancy has decreased; only small gains have been made in the use of the most effective forms of reversible contraception, such as intrauterine devices and hormonal implants; and no additional progress has been made toward reducing unintended pregnancy.

As part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the U.S. Department Health and Human Services charged the Institute of Medicine with identifying which preventive services are important to women’s health and should be covered at no cost to patients. Following the Institute of Medicine’s recommendation, the full range of FDA-approved contraception methods, sterilization procedures, and patient education and counseling for women with reproductive capacity will be covered without cost sharing in new health plans beginning in August 2012. The removal of cost as one barrier to correct and consistent contraceptive use might contribute to a reduction in the number of unintended pregnancies and consequently the number of abortions that are performed in the United States.

What if this is the message the Bishops got, and they feel better not because the birth control coverage is going away, but because they were sold on an argument that the provision would reduce a stalled out abortion rate?

I have huge, huge problems with my argument here. Most of the folks currently advocating to keep no-cost contraception coverage are about a million times more politically connected than I am. They’re more likely to have inside information, and also more able to mobilize on delivering voters in response to either a birth control win or loss. I’ve read some stuff on the internet and thought about it, and decided not to be completely cynical in this one case. To be even more explicit: I’m in a position of knowing less than people I’m disagreeing with.

Also, the CDC report is attributed to a bunch of MPHs, people who in my experience tend to be very practical about public health in a way that gets read as “liberal.” They have their own opinions, and may have expressed them in this surveillance report with absolutely no input from the Administration. The 2007 abortion surveillance data was the subject to political scrutiny even before it was released, so there must be an awareness that this simple government report has become politicized and more widely known, but that doesn’t suggest there was any high-level coordination on it’s content.

And sure, the Bishops are against birth control. They’re against abortion, too, but also against birth control. A “let’s increase use of birth control” argument is a hard one to win with them, even though most women, including Catholics, do use birth control at some point. They’ve specifically campaigned against the birth control coverage provision.

But.

I think it’s just *possible* that what made that Bishop come away feeling more at peace is a clear argument that increasing access to contraception has the effect of reducing abortions. I could see the case being made that, “Look, abortion is no longer declining. Contraception use is. These are women who would use birth control anyway, they don’t share your perspective, and this way we get them birth control instead of abortions.” And the Bishops were reasonable enough understand and agree to some mutually beneficial politically expedient course of action once the “we’re keeping birth control” announcement is made.

Whew.

Okay, my supplies of optimism and willingness to make a possibly absurd argument have been exhausted for about the next two weeks. Later.


Filed under: Abortion, Abuse, Rape, & Safety, Access, Rights, & Choice, Contraception, Government ]]> http://womenshealthnews.wordpress.com/2011/11/27/in-which-im-an-irrepressible-optimist-about-obama-birth-control-and-those-bishops/feed/ 1 Rachel http://womenshealthnews.wordpress.com/2011/11/20/transgender-day-of-remembrance-2011/ http://womenshealthnews.wordpress.com/2011/11/20/transgender-day-of-remembrance-2011/#comments Sun, 20 Nov 2011 18:49:37 +0000 Rachel http://womenshealthnews.wordpress.com/?p=5757 ]]> Today marks Transgender Day of Remembrance, which is “set aside to memorialize those who were killed due to anti-transgender hatred or prejudice.”

Transgender people face increased risks of violence and other adverse effects of discrimination. According to a recent report [PDF]:

• The report’s sample was nearly four times more likely to have a household income of less than $10,000/year compared to the general population.
• “Over one-quarter (26%) reported that they had lost a job due to being transgender or gender non-conforming and 50% were harassed.”
• “41%…reported attempting suicide compared to 1.6% of the general population, with rates rising for those who lost a job due to bias (55%), were harassed/bullied in school (51%), had low household income, or were the victim of physical assault (61%) or sexual assault (64%).”
• “One-fifth (19%) reported experiencing homelessness at some point in their lives because they were transgender or gender nonconforming; the majority of those trying to access a homeless shelter were harassed by shelter staff or residents (55%), 29% were turned away altogether, and 22% were sexually assaulted by residents or staff.”

This page provides some ideas for actions you can take to support the human rights and safety of transgender people. What the statistics above – and the action suggestions focusing on schools, police, prisons, housing, and healthcare – make clear is how anti-transgender hatred and discrimination affects every part of life for a transgender person. How inescapable the possibility of being crushed in everyday life might seem, and how such pervasive oppression deserves my and our attention.

The names of the people being remembered this year (since last Nov 20) are:
Luisa Alvarado Hernandez  (Comayaguela City, Honduras)
Lady Oscar Martinez Salgado (Tegucigalpa, Honduras)
Reana ‘Cheo’ Bustamente (Tegucigalpa, Honduras)
Génesis Briget Makaligton (Comayagüela City, Honduras)
Krissy Bates (Minneapolis, Minnesota)
Fergie Alice Ferg (San Pedro Sula, Honduras)
Tyra Trent (Baltimore, Maryland)
Priscila Brandão (Belo Horizonte, Brazil)
Marcal Camero Tye (Forrest City, Arkansas)
Shakira Harahap (Taman Lawang, Jakarta, Indonesia)
Miss Nate Nate (or Née) Eugene Davis (Houston, Texas)
Lashai Mclean  (Washington, D.C.)
Didem  (Findikzade, Istanbul)
Camila Guzman (New York, New York)
Gaby (Jalisco, Mexico)
unidentified male dressed in women’s clothes (Paris, France)
Gaurav Gopalan (Washington, D.C.)
Name Unknown (Gaziantep, Turkey)
Shelley Hilliard (Detroit, Michigan)
Jessica Rollon (Bergamo, Italy)
Astrid Carolina López Cruz (Madrid, Spain)
Cassidy Nathan Vickers (Hollywood, California)

See also: Natalie’s post at skepchick.


Filed under: Abuse, Rape, & Safety, Access, Rights, & Choice, Events & Observances ]]> http://womenshealthnews.wordpress.com/2011/11/20/transgender-day-of-remembrance-2011/feed/ 0 Rachel remembrance2011 http://womenshealthnews.wordpress.com/2011/11/13/sunday-news-round-up-40mph-winds-edition/ http://womenshealthnews.wordpress.com/2011/11/13/sunday-news-round-up-40mph-winds-edition/#comments Sun, 13 Nov 2011 19:55:40 +0000 Rachel http://womenshealthnews.wordpress.com/?p=5722 ]]> Some things that caught my attention this week, with bonus “this week in misogyny” content.

I don’t know how many people noticed, and I assume it won’t go anywhere, but Michele Bachmann introduced a forced ultrasound for abortion bill in the House. It’s been sent to the Subcommittee on Health.

The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy has launched a new website, Bedsider, about birth control and says it’s intended for women ages 18-29 years. I haven’t looked through it thoroughly, but it includes comparisons of different methods of preventing pregnancy by factors like cost, immediacy, STI prevention, ease of getting and using the method, ease of hiding it from a partner, and degree of mistake-proofed-ness. It is focused through a pregnancy prevention lens, so the site is focused on penis-in-vagina sex, not other forms of sex or prevention. I haven’t reviewed the site thoroughly, but let me know what you think. Some of the language seems a little, uh, teen magazine-y for my tastes and for a target audience that is actually made up of adults, but perhaps it’s my advanced age talking there (early 30s).

Over at OBOS, between C and I we’ve covered Mississippi, personhood, and reproductive justice, and new research on in vitro fertilization and ovarian cancer risks.

The CDC released the final data on 2009 births [PDF] in the United States. It’s full of data on the number of births, birth rates by things about women, like their age and marital status, and rates of cesarean (another all-time high), low birth weight, preterm, and out of hospital births. [hat tip to Jill]

Jaclyn Friedman, who I met briefly at the Our Bodies Ourselves 40th, has a new book out, What You Really, Really Want: The Smart Girl’s Shame-Free Guide to Sex and Safety. I haven’t read it yet, but there’s a Twitter chat happening at 9pm Eastern tonight using the hashtag #shamefreesex.

B points out the ridiculousness of news coverage taking the “vodka-soaked tampon” story seriously. Notably, liquid-soaked tampons expand and are not exactly convenient for insertion. Aside from which, alcohol+mucous membranes would probably hurt. And the likelihood of it being widespread for teenage boys to be inserting said vodka-soaked tampons rectally is just absurdly small. And then there was the follow-up to B’s post, which takes a quick downward spiral in the comments to “if we take your picture without permission but link to you, you should be glad of the traffic”-land.

The FDA released a new statement on Makena, a drug intended to help prevent preterm birth. It has been the subject of controversy because versions of the same ingredient in Makena has been available for pretty cheap through compound pharmacies for a long time. FDA’s approval of Makena with it’s extremely high price, have generated strong reactions and concerns about access. The FDA’s new statement basically says, “The company that makes Makena says those vastly cheaper compound pharmacy products vary in their strength and purity, so we’re going to look into it.”

The agency also approved the first therapy derived from cord blood cells.

Jill at Feministe had a note left in her suitcase by the TSA when she checked what she’s referring to as a “personal item.” A note that read, “get your freak on girl.” Jill follows up that the TSA agent who left that note has been suspended, and Jill responds to the lack of response to the real problem here: “…I get no satisfaction in hearing that someone may be in danger of losing their job over this. I would much prefer a look at why ‘security’ has been used to justify so many intrusions on our civil liberties, rather than fire a person who made a mistake.”

This week, the CDC is running a campaign focused on the smart and appropriate use of antibiotics. Go to the website to learn more about why you don’t always need antibiotics and why it’s bad for all of us to use too many.

Transgender Day of Remembrance is coming up on November 20th.

The Abortioneers ask when to speak up, when to keep your mouth shut, and how to know the difference.

The fact that women prisoners often get shackled during labor is discussed at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, in an interview with a fiction writer who covered this practice in a book.

Sometime this week, I stumbled across #occupyhealthcare and the accompanying website. The contributors seem to be mostly healthcare providers and adjacents, focused on increasing access to healthcare.

The government has issued a “Leading Health Indicators App Challenge,” soliciting developers to create apps that promote the use of key measures of health (“indicators”) to improve the health of communities.

The Census released new data with the headline, “Half of First-Time Mothers Receive Paid Leave, Census Bureau Reports.” Before you get too excited, “paid” leave included not just official paid maternity leave, but using up your own existing balance of paid sick and/or vacation leave, if you’re fortunate enough to have that. They also noted that women who got some type of paid leave were *more* likely to return to work within 3-5 months, making me wonder if they are often returning to work when they exhaust their reserves of paid sick or other time. Then there’s this limitation: “Given that FMLA and other leave policies in the United States do not allow for leave for more than 12 weeks, it is not entirely surprising that new mothers return to work relatively soon.”

ePatientDave writes about how impossible to understand an “explanation of benefits” document can be and how we’re prevented from stopping errors and reducing costs because of this lack of transparency.

This week in misogyny:
Rick Perry’s “departments I would close” gaffe has received most of the news coverage, but in the same GOP candidate debate, Herman Cain referred to Representative/former Speaker Nancy Pelosi as “Princess Nancy.” He or his team reiterated this remark on Twitter, before offering the fauxpology that he “probably shouldn’t have” made the remark, but “was trying to make a point.” A point that required a gendered diminishing and dismissal of a powerful woman politician, apparently. I guess he thought he had built up too much goodwill with women over the course of his sexual harassment scandal.

Using the #mencallmethings hashtag (which Sady Doyle apparently started), feminist women bloggers took to Twitter to talk about some of the vile things that have been said to them in the course of their writing, including rape and death threats. I contributed a rape threat I received through the comments here because I had the temerity to dislike a rape joke on tv. Just another humorless feminist who deserved threats of violence because of it, right? @metalmujer and others pointed out that the hashtag itself would be better focused on misogyny rather than “men.” Yes, most of the excessively hateful and threatening remarks I’ve been subjected to have been made by men, but the problem is not something about all men, it’s the misogyny these particular men have carried out and a culture that encourages them to do so.

I also keep seeing this image on Facebook intended at a critique of dubstep and its fans. I don’t have an opinion one way or the other about the actual quality of dubstep or its fans over time, but I do know that when the main critique is presented as “it was good when it was a bunch of men standing around, now it sucks and is by/for little girls,” that’s misogyny.


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