WMC News & Features
A Few Acres and a Cow (or Two): Up from Poverty in East Africa
Backed by Gates Foundation funding, women dairy farmers in Uganda are working collectively to care for their families, their livestock, their crops and the earth.
WMC News & Features
Health Care Reform: Pro-choice Forces Win the First Round in the Senate
Senate Democrats held firm to allow debate to begin on a health care bill that avoids the abortion restrictions of the House-passed measure—and pro-choice activists are mobilizing to keep the heat on. But there are many hurdles ahead.
WMC News & Features
Will Progressive Groups Help Feminists Stop Stupak?
After the shocking setback in the House for abortion rights, women’s rights groups turned their attention to the Senate, which could begin debate on health care reform next week.
WMC News & Features
The Democrats’ Dilemma: Their Own Trojan Horse Kicks Free
Democratic leaders have said that the turn-around on abortion contained in the House health-reform bill will not appear in the final version. The author, a Women’s Media Center board member and former president ofPlanned Parenthood Federation of America, explains here why voters who value women’s health cannot sit back and accept such assurances.
WMC News & Features
Taking the Fall for Health Care Reform?
The price for health care reform in the House is women’s right to choose—and, adding insult to injury, the deal was negotiated by the first woman to serve as House speaker.
WMC News & Features
Living With Disability -- And Recession
The U.S. Congress designated October as National Disability Employment Awareness Month. From an international perspective, the author explains how economic hard times are particularly harsh for women with disabilities.
WMC News & Features
Chronic Illness and Health Care Reform: I’m Too Tired to Fight This By Myself
Health care reform, crucial to all of us, is especially important to the chronically ill, who need coverage of “maintenance medicine”—everyday care that can be guaranteed in a national system. The author is doing all she can, but she needs some help.
WMC News & Features
For Wage-Earning Women—A 21st Century Answer
Employed women have a wide variety of needs—equitable wages, reliable benefits, regular hours and flexible schedules—the very issues that unions can address through collective bargaining. Passage of the Employee Free Choice Act can help.
WMC News & Features
Health Care Reform: Post-recess Politics
House and Senate members return to D.C. next week having heard an earful from constituents on health care reform. It falls to President Obama to cut through the confusion.
WMC News & Features
Media Blind to GOP Hypocrisy in Health Care Debate
On this Women’s Equality Day, the author suggests that the Republicans should not have a free ride as they deny women reproductive care while sanctifying the doctor-patient relationship and decrying government involvement in the health care system.
WMC News & Features
Health Care Reform—What’s At Stake for Women?
The firestorm about the public option may miss the point for women. Women’s groups have worked with the White House and legislators to put critical expansion of care in all the major health care reform bills making their way through Congress.
WMC News & Features
Honoring Evelyn Coke
She fought all the way to the Supreme Court to win justice for home care workers. Now we must honor her by advancing her cause.
WMC News & Features
July 31, 2009 | C. Stacy Beam |
Health
It’s All About Choices: A Nurse’s View of Health Reform
If health care reform is enacted—and if it works to lower costs and keep Americans healthy—nurses will be a large part of the solution, argues the author. Trust her: she’s a nurse.
WMC News & Features
Will Healthcare Reform Be Fair to Immigrants?
For reform to work, argues the author, it must fully include immigrant communities, whose members already struggle to afford decent medical care in the United States.
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 ...