WMC News & Features
“Supa”: A Report from Kenya
The author, a medical doctor and writer, learned in an African village the truth behind the alarming worldwide maternal health statistics—when she was asked to treat a patient whose only resource was her mother, frantically urging her to “push.”
WMC News & Features
June 17, 2009 | Karin Lippert |
Health
The OHIP Card—the Benefits are Priceless
Don’t be misled by the rhetoric of opponents of single-payer health care, says the author, who has experienced the insurance systems on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border. She has a decided prefer...
WMC News & Features
Obama Needs a Frances Perkins by his Side
President Barack Obama has emphasized that affordable health care for all is crucial for long-term economic prosperity. Frances Perkins made that point in 1933. A new biography brings President Franklin Roosevelt’s labor secretary out of the shadows just in time for us to understand why progressive women matter so much as America struggles with economic crisis, war and recovery from callous, corrupt government.
WMC News & Features
“Lonely Soldier Monologues” Only Opens an Essential National Conversation
Helen Benedict’s play, now ending its run in New York, focuses attention on enlisted women soldiers with the authenticity of their own words. Now, argues a former Marine, we must go on to recognize ...
WMC News & Features
Obama Comes Through, Reversing Bush Era Repro-rights Restrictions
Monies to expand family planning services for poor women that were cut from the stimulus package are restored in President Obama’s proposed budget, and the administration rescinds a last-minute Bush Administration rule that would have severely weakened women’s access to reproductive health services.
WMC News & Features
February 02, 2009 | Marianne Schnall |
Arts and culture,
Feminism,
Health,
International,
Politics,
Violence against women
Turning Pain to Power
Women and girls in eastern Congo suffer sexual atrocities that are tactics of war in the region. Playwright Eve Ensler has joined with Dr. Denis Mukwege to ask us to imagine the unimaginable, to empathize and join together to end the terror.
WMC News & Features
We All Deserve Time to Be with Loved Ones
The health needs of those we love can suddenly become a top priority for anyone—even a presidential candidate in the final days of a historic election. Only some political leaders and legislators, however, are willing to give all workers the flexibility they must have during a health emergency.
WMC News & Features
McCain Ridicules Health Exemptions for Abortion
The final presidential debate touched on three important issues for women, while women’s groups continue to press the campaigns for an elusive commitment to a Lifetime TV forum that would allow more extensive discussion and questioning.
WMC News & Features
The View from Stephanie Tubbs Jones’ Turf
It’s a strange truth that national and international news somehow looks different, up close. So I found it to be upon waking up in Ohio last week, where I happened to be working, the morning following the untimely death of Democratic Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones, 58, from a massive brain aneurysm.
WMC News & Features
In November, Women Will Vote With Health Care In Mind
Women vote for health care, and with good reason.
Today, women across the country are being forced to make impossible choices in the name of health care; sacrificing life and limb so that they can...
WMC News & Features
March 31, 2008 | Avis A. Jones-DeWeever, Ph.D. |
Health
Today's Scarlet Letter
We like to believe that today, we have discarded Puritanical punishments in favor of a far more humane public sphere. Yet issues of stigma and shame remain powerful cultural forces that continue to ...
WMC News & Features
March 27, 2008 | Paula J. Caplan |
Health
The Mystery Suspect in the U.S. "Obesity Epidemic"
If you wanted to make someone feel helpless, hopeless, even crazy, one good way to do it would be this: Teach them that others will value them mostly for being thin and being nurturant, put them in ...
WMC News & Features
Who Is Making Those Troubling Toys from China?
Just as Detroit is famous for making cars and Napa for producing wine, Cheng Hai in Guangdong Province, not far from Hong Kong, is known for manufacturing toys for children all over the world, espec...
WMC News & Features
November 02, 2007 | Linda Steinberg |
Health
Hysterectomies—Frequently Performed But Often Unnecessary
Hysterectomy, the second most frequent major operation performed on women in the United States, has long been criticized as being over performed, especially for benign conditions. In the late sixtie...
WMC News & Features
On World Poverty Day—Women Hold the Key
This year marks almost the halfway point in the 15-year time-span set in 2000 for the world to realize eight ambitious targets, the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. Still a millennium aw...
WMC News & Features
America’s Military Kids Are Latest Collateral Damage
The children of the troops serving in Iraq are experiencing significant collateral damage at home, according to two staggering new reports on the occurrence of child maltreatment, neglect, and abuse...
WMC News & Features
Opting for Family-Friendly Policies
In a recent article and a follow-up blog on women’s work patterns, two Washington Post writers cling to the traditional media framing of the difficult options facing a mother as being within the rea...
WMC News & Features
SiCKO Hits the House
It’s ironic, but outside of hospitals and day care centers, perhaps the best place to acquire some kind of illness on Wednesday in Washington, D.C., was Michael Moore’s press conference on Capitol H...
WMC News & Features
Misleading Ads and How They Hurt Us
Selling anxiety sells medicine. Drug companies know this and profit by it. But are women benefiting as much as the industry’s bottom line?
The pharmaceutical industry spent much of its $4.2 billio...
WMC News & Features
Media Mistakes Fuel High Court Abortion Ruling
[The] partial birth abortion ban is a political scam but a public relations goldmine... The major benefit is the debate that surrounds it. —Randall Terry
Ruth Bader Ginzburg’s Dissent As Linda ...
WMC News & Features
April 09, 2007 | Peggy Simpson |
Health
Understanding Women’s Risks for Cardiovascular Disease
Most women think cardiovascular disease is a “man’s disease.” Wrong.
Coronary heart disease caused one in six female deaths in 2004 compared to one in 30 from breast cancer, says the American Hear...
WMC News & Features
One More Taboo
In 1984, when my brother came down with the mysterious disease that came to be called AIDS, the diagnosis was a death sentence; today it is a disconcerting and traumatic, but not fatal, surprise. Th...
WMC News & Features
Promising Signs at the UN
While he was still secretary-general designate, in his first address to the General Assembly, Ban Ki-Moon promised he would “lead by example” and announced that one of his goals was to appoint more ...
WMC News & Features
Regan Hofmann on the Hidden Faces of HIV
“Is there any way that we can stop this?” Regan Hofmann asked the Creative Director of POZ magazine the night before its April edition went to press. With the April issue, Hofmann officially came ou...
WMC News & Features
Court Documents Reveal FDA Politicized Plan B Approval-Update
On August 24th, in an almost complete reversal of its 2004 decision, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Plan B emergency contraception to be sold over the counter, but only to women 18 ...