Newsletter

Our year with Law Students for Reproductive Justice (LSRJ) fellow Keely Monroe flew by!  Keely has been a core member of the NWHN team and a leader on our Raising Women’s Voices for the Health Care We Need campaign.  (Make sure you read her article in this issue about the new preventive health coverage for women that started August 1.)  But at the end of August, her fellowship with us ended and we had to say goodbye.

By Charlea Massion and Adriane Fugh-Berman

“Lets just do a CT scan to be sure…” the doctor says. These days, having a CT scan seems routine, like having a strep test when you have a sore throat. In 2007, about 70 million CT scans were performed in the U.S. — triple the number done in 1993.¹ About two-thirds of CT scans are done on women.¹

By Amy Allina

When the U.S. government invests more than $600 million in the largest study of older women ever conducted…

And, the study yields such definitive results that the scientists providing ethical oversight for the research decide that it should be halted years early because the questions it was designed to answer have been clearly and solidly answered…

By Leeann Simons, MS, RD, LDN 

By Xiaofan Pan

As a rape survivor and student, I intimately know the struggle to sustain a sense of self while pushing for justice within the university judicial system. One of the most trying aspects for survivors, including myself, is the lack of fairness in university misconduct proceedings.

By Susan Yanow, MSW

“Danielle Deaver was 22 weeks pregnant when her water broke and doctors gave her a devastating prognosis: With undeveloped lungs, the baby likely would never survive outside the womb, and because all the amniotic fluid had drained, the tiny growing fetus slowly would be crushed by the uterus walls. Deaver's prior pregnancy ended the same way at 15 weeks, and doctors induced her to spare the pain.  But this time, when the couple sought the same procedure, doctors could not legally help them. Just one month earlier, Nebraska had enacted the nation's first fetal pain legislation, banning abortions after 20 weeks gestation. So the Deavers had to wait more than a week to deliver baby Elizabeth, who died after just 15 minutes....”¹.

G spots

We often face harsh realities when we don’t fit into what society deems to be normal. But, does that also mean we can be harassed or discriminated against?  The Federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) doesn’t think so. In April, the EEOC ruled that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects transgender and gender non-conforming workers from employment discrimination. This landmark change clarifies existing national policy and strengthens this (too slowly) evolving area of employment law.

By Amy Allina

Here in the U.S., we aren’t very good at talking about contraception. In fact, we’re usually down-right terrible at it! Recent conservative attacks have focused public attention on how universally accepted contraceptive use is in this country, which may make it a little easier for us to talk about. But, these attacks have serious downsides for the contraceptive conversation, too.

By Christina Cherel

They say good men are hard to find and that sailing through the dating waters can be rough. I’ve found that, for an outspoken, pro-choice feminist woman in her early twenties, the pool of eligible bachelors is even shallower.