The last few weeks have seen Tennessee on several “worst of” lists for women. The popular iVillage ranked us #40 among the “worst states for women” – for our lower rates of college degree completion, lower earnings, low levels of representation of women in state government, poor health, attacks on women’s rights, and other factors.

This week, Forbes named Knoxville, TN (home of Stacey Campfield) #3 in its list of Most Unfair Cities To Be A Working Woman because of disparities in pay between men and women.

And I missed this last month, but the blogger at Lavender and Cheese writes about another embarrassing finding that got basically no media attention here – Black women die more from breast cancer than white women, and that’s more true in Memphis, Tennessee than in any of the nation’s other largest cities. In Memphis, a Black woman is more than twice as likely to die as a white woman.

As that blogger explains:

We know what these numbers mean: black women are not getting the same access to cancer treatment that white women are. This is not a genetics problem; it’s a care problem, it’s an education problem, and it’s a socioeconomic problem.

And it’s exactly this kind of care inequality that the healthcare reform bill is supposed to alleviate.

The fact that this study has gone unreported and apparently unnoticed in Tennessee has to be a result of two things: laziness and cowardice.

I was born and raised in Tennessee. I chose to come back here after college. Like B, there are absolutely things I love about this state, from the big beauty of the landscape to smaller pleasures of local businesses and institutions and people. It’s not all about politics – but our politics are seriously messed up here right now.

We have Democrats in power who can’t bring themselves to denounce a State Rep when he publicly threatened to “stomp” any transgender woman he encounters. We have bills specifically trying to shame and intimidate women getting legal abortions and their providers, transformed into a bill to limit access in another dishonest way.

We have serious economic problems and disparities, a long list of problems that are getting us on other people’s “worst of” lists that we could tackle. Meanwhile, our state legislators are focused on saggy pants, making sure it’s okay for creationism to be discussed seriously in science classes, and pushing the racism and classism of trying to drug test all welfare recipients. And our Governor, Republican Bill Haslam, had the nerve to blame the media for covering this nonsense, instead of doing his job as a leader and taking on the state legislators for introducing and pushing said nonsense.

Welcome to Tennessee. Although we need you here, if you’re a woman, or poor, or not white and straight and cis and Christian, or you have a decent handle on science, you might want to pass on through, unless you have a lot of energy and patience for the fight. At least for now.

Filed under: Access, Rights, & Choice, Cancer, Ethics, Government, Laws, Legislation, & Courts

First, some recent posts at Our Bodies Our Blog:

Pink Ribbons, Inc. – A Closer Look at Breast Cancer Marketing – I’m really looking forward to seeing this film, especially after all the recent Komen/Planned Parenthood controversy. It’s going to show in several U.S. cities at various events this spring. Pink Ribbons, Inc. people, if you’re reading this, you totally want to hook me up with the showing at the Nashville Film Festival.

Christine also covered Komen and Planned Parenthood and stupid, sexist “barstool sports,” and Judy has something on Planned Parenthood and the Catholic bishops.

Finally, Good Vibrations selected Our Bodies Ourselves as one organization it’s supporting during February and March. If you buy something from their website or in stores, select OBOS during checkout to make a donation that goes entirely to the organization. Go on and buy yourself a Valentine’s present. Or, hey, buy me something, since I don’t otherwise have a tip jar.

Now, onto to other things:

Judy Stone has a great guest post at the Scientific American blogs, Molecules to Medicine: Plan B: The Tradition of Politics at the FDA. Stone ultimately looks at Kathleen Sebelius’s decision to override the FDA’s approval of over-the-counter access to Plan B, but also provides a review of past political decisions and appointees at the FDA, and U.S. government interference in sexual health care and information generally.

Soraya L. Chemaly has something at The Feminist Wire in response to that ridiculous recent piece in the New York Times about girls and “hysteria.”

Flanagan closes with the particularly ironic advice that what girls need is “protection from the most corrosive cultural forces that seek to exploit her when she is least able to resist.”…What girls really need is not to be characterized as inherently mad or inclined to the irrational.

Nick Baumann at Mother Jones writes about The Republican War on Contraception:

…in the past six months, social conservatives have widened their offensive, and their new target is clear: Not satisfied with making it harder to obtain legal abortions, they want to limit access to birth control, too.

I’m pretty sure a lot of women have seen this coming for a while.

I don’t agree with absolutely everything in Nicholas Kristoff’s NY Times piece, “Beyond Pelvic Politics,” but let me just highlight this:

A 2009 study looked at sexually active American women of modest means, ages 18 to 34, whose economic circumstances had deteriorated. Three-quarters said that they could not afford a baby then. Yet 30 percent had put off a gynecological or family-planning visit to save money. More horrifying, of those using the pill, one-quarter said that they economized by not taking it every day.

and this:

If we have to choose between bishops’ sensibilities and women’s health, our national priority must be the female half of our population.

Rachel Maddow has a piece on the birth control nonsense as well.

Nationally, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan has introduced a national forced ultrasound bill, which I think I’ll start calling a “forced vaginal insertion of an object” bill. We should require all members of Congress to participate in a simulation display of a transvaginal ultrasound, although I’d be kind of afraid of their reactions.

A national forced 24-hour waiting period for abortion has also been introduced, this one by South Carolina’s Jeff Duncan.

Neither of these things is based on medical evidence; both are purely for the purpose of making it more difficult for women to obtain safe, legal, timely abortions. Dr. Jen Gunter talks about what happens to women exposed to inexpert abortion attempts when safe and legal isn’t an option.

And in Tennessee, Planned Parenthood has sued the state, which previously awarded the organization grants for STI and HIV prevention, but in December yanked the funding without providing an explanation, or an alternative route for those services. One of the affected Memphis sites was reportedly the only place around to get HIV testing done after daytime work hours. Pressed on the issue, Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam refused to provide any real explanation of the decision, saying, “The commissioner felt like there were other people who could provide that service just as well.” There was no explanation about why, if that were the case, those others didn’t get the grant during the competitive process last year, and as far as I know, none of those other “just as well” services have actually been awarded the funding.

Mary at Hoyden About Town has a cool post on soliciting research participants, with a lot of good points on what should be communicated to potential study participants and what researchers owe them for their participation.

And completely unrelated to anything, I cannot stop looking at these underwater dogs.

[note: I modified the title after I realized a possible mis-reading of it]

Filed under: Abortion, Access, Rights, & Choice, Cancer, Contraception, Drugs, Government, HIV/AIDS, Infectious Diseases, Laws, Legislation, & Courts, News Round-Ups, Sex & Sex Education

HHS Affirms Contraception as Covered Preventive Service – I’m glad I didn’t have to take back this post, although the Plan B bullshit was probably more responsible than a successful appeal to reason.

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.

Filed under: Abortion, Access, Rights, & Choice, Birth, Contraception, Government

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

photo: iStockphoto/Thinkstock

Breast cancer risk factors are identifiable traits or habits that make some people more susceptible than others to the disease. 

Know your risk…

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photo: iStockPhoto/Thinkstock

Are you currently battling breast cancer? Are you a breast cancer survivor? Share your journey with us by emailing breastcancerstories@rodale.com. You story may be featured in an upcoming article on WomensHealthMag.com.

Please include the following information in your email…

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The local newspaper is covering genetic tests for breast cancer, privacy, gene tests patents, cost, and the fears some people have about getting tested.

Iris Carmen at Jezebel has a piece, “The Fight For Abortion Access For Military Women,” that is really about barriers in the military that prevent women from reporting sexual assault, the institutional difficulties faced by women servicemembers who become pregnant, and their lack of access to abortion coverage and providers.

Via the CDC’s National Prevention Intervention Network (@cdcnpin)

Follow @CDCNPIN@CDCNPIN
CDC NPIN

#30years ago today, @CDCMMWR reported on 1st cases of what became known as #AIDS. http://ow.ly/59vq3

June 5, 2011 8:31 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

The link in the tweet goes to the actual June 5, 1981 MMWR reporting 5 cases of Pneumocystis Pneumonia in Los Angeles. It’s sort of a punch in the gut to read the opening passage of the editorial note – where the MMWR tries to explain what might be going on – knowing what was coming, what these 5 cases were the canary for. Warning for reference to a “homosexual lifestyle.”

Editorial Note: Pneumocystis pneumonia in the United States is almost exclusively limited to severely immunosuppressed patients. The occurrence of pneumocystosis in these 5 previously healthy individuals without a clinically apparent underlying immunodeficiency is unusual. The fact that these patients were all homosexuals suggests an association between some aspect of a homosexual lifestyle or disease acquired through sexual contact and Pneumocystis pneumonia in this population.

Via a librarian attending the Biomedical Informatics course at Woods Hole (#bmispring2011), I learned about the Office of Research Integrity’s page of summaries of closed research misconduct investigations. The cases seem to consist primarily of researchers making up or faking data or figures.

Thought Catalog (with which I’m unfamiliar) has “Tale of an Abortion,” one woman’s story of her choice to have an abortion.

Some Indiana politicians voted to defund Planned Parenthood, which received federal Medicaid/Title X funding for non-abortion health care, like cancer screenings and contraception. In response, HHS sent the state a letter explaining that they could not “exclude qualified health care providers from providing services that are funded under the program because of a provider’s scope of practice.” In other words, you can’t keep somebody from providing Medicaid-funded care just because they also provide non-Medicaid-funded abortions. Apparently it’s going to court.

The Feminist Majority Foundation reports in their feminist daily news that Yale Faces Possible Fines for Failure to Report Sex Crimes.

People.com associate editor Janet Mock writes for Marie Claire about her life as a transgender woman. She also was interviewed for NPR’s Tell Me More; a couple of the commenters note the inappropriate headline given the piece, which used “transgender” as a noun.

Notes from Libraryland:
The Wall Street Journal has a commentary that shouts “you kids get offa my lawn” at current YA fiction, which is apparently too dystopian, depressing, dark, and dangerous for young folks. There’s been a pretty awesome outpouring in defense of (YA) books on Twitter, using the #yasaves hashtag, with many reporting how alone, uninformed, afraid, sheltered, isolated, etc. they would have been if not for YA fiction, which can particularly be a lifeline for people who find that they are different in some way.

Also? It’s pretty hilarious that alongside an article decrying dystopia, darkness, and destruction in current YA fiction, and looks approvingly at efforts to keep those bad, bad YA books out of the hands of kids, a recommended, apparently-officially-okay title is Fahrenheit 451. Excuse me while I step away for a giggle break.

Here’s a 1971 letter from Isaac Asimov to future patrons of a new library. The Troy, MI library in question is in danger of closing if local folks don’t vote this August to fund it.

Apparently there will soon be swag for the National Library of Medicine’s 175th anniversary. This appeals to a special type of library geek.

Via searching on the #yasaves topic, I found this list of YA book recommendations, and have added several of these to my to-read list. Worth checking out.

The title: It has been 95 degrees here for the last week. I’m still walking 2.5 miles outside every day and have a broken a/c at home. If this is May, I might have to move to Antarctica in August.

Filed under: Abortion, Abuse, Rape, & Safety, Access, Rights, & Choice, Adolescent Health, Cancer, Funny, Government, HIV/AIDS, Libraryland, Miscellaneous, News Round-Ups, Pregnancy

Page Kelley and five of her ski-loving friends are on a serious bender ( a ski one, that is). They’re planning to ski all 27 Colorado ski resorts in just eight days. Why? To raise money and awareness for breast cancer research and education, in partnership with the Colorado Breast Cancer Coalition.

Intrigued, inspired, and frankly a little chilled at the thought, we chatted with Page to learn all about her project, Ski Bumps. Fight Lumps. (How cute a name is that, seriously?!)

Skiing and breast cancer—that’s a pretty original pair. What made you combine the two?

As far as we can tell, no one has skied 27 Colorado resorts in eight days. We wanted to do something that no one has done before.

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The Now@NEJM blog posted a new item in its Clinical Practice series, Streptococcal Pharyngitis. This seemed particularly relevant after a worker fixing a light on Friday – after about 20 minutes in my office – told me all about how his current case of strep throat. The NEJM piece doesn’t seem to address people like me, though – I have a penicillin allergy!

Acquaintance Ilissa has a diary up at Daily Kos on her first morning as an abortion clinic escort. I particularly liked one of the comments: “There is not room in one skin for two people with full rights.”

At the New York Times, Study of Breast Biopsies Finds Surgery Used Too Extensively. This would be the kind of harm people were talking about when they talked about what happens when we do too many mammograms on low-risk women.

Ema at the Well-Timed Period says it clearly with regards to the South Dakota bill that could have made it legal to murder abortion providers, and how any changes they make to the bill now don’t make up for it:

Bottom line: Just because Rep. Phil Jensen and his cohorts were caught in the act of trying to legalize domestic terrorism and, when called on it, made some changes to the bill doesn’t mean they are absolved of responsibility.

Relatedly, over at Our Bodies Our Blog today I have The State-Level War on Choice: Updates from South Dakota. Note: I’m no longer even considering the possibility that Republicans “didn’t mean it that way” when they propose egregious legislation.

Over at The Unnecesarean, emajaybee writes about a 1940s experiment at the larger workplace in which pregnant women were given radioactive iron as part of an experiment. As I mentioned there, I first learned of this a few years ago when helping some students look for materials for a project on these studies. Over the weekend, I went to use the Nashville Banner (local newspaper) archives at the Nashville Public Library and pulled a news item on the experiments, if anyone would like to see it.

In the midst of the House vote to defund Title X (which funds family planning health services, including those non-abortion services provided by Planned Parenthood), I’ve picked up on some comments on Twitter stating that Planned Parenthood is anti-trans. While I support Planned Parenthood’s provision of low cost health services and tireless support of choice, those are serious allegations that deserve attention. I’m in the process of trying to learn more, but haven’t found much online – I’ve run into comments like this one and this one, but would like to find out more about how much this involves individual screw-ups vs. organizational policy, and if PP staff are held accountable by their employers for anti-trans statements and practices. If anyone has insights into how/whether PP folks are trained to provide services to trans women and men, or how PP is failing trans women individually or systemically, I would like to hear about that. There need to be clear consequences for PP staff members who discriminate against *any* women.

That said, I do believe PP provides crucial access to abortion services and other family planning and health services for so many women, and defunding Title X further disadvantages poor women who rely on their services.

Relatedly, in my searching, I found this post: Promoting and Protecting the Sexual and Reproductive Rights and Health of Transgender People: What We Can Do, which outlines actions to be taken by the public, donor agencies, and states.

Not really health related, but some bills have been introduced in Tennessee that are similar to the union-busting bills in Wisconsin. The Tennessee Education Association is having a rally in Nashville on March 5th.

Filed under: Access, Rights, & Choice, Government, News Round-Ups, Pregnancy, Women’s Health

Some of my recent posts at Our Bodies Our Blog are highlighted below. Don’t forget the upcoming 40th anniversary of the landmark book; a new edition will come out next year to celebrate the milestone! In the meantime, catch up with health news and commentary over at http://www.ourbodiesourblog.org

Election-Related Repro Rights Round-Up – a collection of commentary from reproductive rights advocates on what the recent election may mean for women.

NPR Takes on Pink Ribbon Fatigue: Views from Komen, Breast Cancer Action – NPR talked to a representative of Breast Cancer Action, which has criticized pink ribbon campaigns for breast cancer, and a representative of Komen, which kind of thrives on them.

Meeting Dispatch: Resources from the CUE/Cochrane/Campbell Colloquium – Includes links to plenary session videos from speakers including Susan Love and former Rep. Patricia Schroeder, as well as online resources for health information.

Letters Respond to Lancet Home Birth Editorial With Feminist Perspective – snippets from letters responding to an editorial that proclaimed that “Women have the right to choose how and where to give birth, but they do not have the right to put their baby at risk.” Oh hell yeah we do. Ahem.

And also, from our fearless leader Judy Norsigian: Share Your Story: What Have You Learned About Your Body from a Women’s Health Nurse-Practitioner Or Other OB-GYN Clinician? – a call for clinicians to share their stories of educating women about their bodies, and for women who have benefited from clinicians who really take the time to explain what’s going on with their bodies to tell those stories as well. See the post for further details.

Filed under: Access, Rights, & Choice, Boobs, Cancer, Events & Observances, Government, Miscellaneous, Web Resources, Women’s Health