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EVERYTHING
Cleveland Clinic Launches Center for Women in Midlife
What: The Cleveland Clinic launched a “Women’s Comprehensive Health and Research Center,” which aims to help women in midlife get the care they need. The center brings together “behavioral health, breast health, cardiovascular care, center for infant and maternal health, endocrinology and weight management, menopause, osteoporosis” and more under one roof. Maria Shriver is serving as a strategic adviser to the center.
Why it matters: The Cleveland Clinic is considered a leading medical institution in the country, what they do can set trends in care.
Source: Cleveland Clinic
ABORTION ACCESS
In Messy Post-Roe World, Women Turn to Social Media for Abortion Guidance
What: The New York Times profiles women who are sharing their abortion experiences on social media, post-Roe. One of the women, Sunni, told viewers that “she was craving information when she was planning her abortion. ‘This is the video I was looking for,’ she said.”
Why it matters: Abortion laws now vary significantly across state lines, and many are purposefully vague. That means people are “confused over where and what forms of abortion are allowed state to state” and researchers have found “young people seeking to end their pregnancies are increasingly turning to social media for guidance.”
Source: New York Times
Legal Journal Article Lays Out the Stark Reality of Criminalized Abortion
What: An article from Duke’s Journal of Constitutional Law & Public Policy says it is “the first to evaluate new and existing laws criminalizing abortion post-Dobbs and consider how modern technologies directed toward the investigation of individuals self-managing abortions through medication will magnify the pervasiveness, scale, and harm of such surveillance.”
Why it matters: As the article explains, the “state statutes criminalizing abortion [are] coupled with surveillance methods and technologies that did not exist pre-Roe present new and complex challenges surrounding the protection of women’s privacy and liberty interests.” It explores in-depth exactly where the gray areas exist in current state law, concluding that “a failure to provide clarity should be read for what it is: in some cases, a deliberate obfuscation of anti-abortion goals; in others, a tolerance of dangerous ambiguity.”
Source: Duke Journal of Constitutional Law & Public Policy and Brookings
CARDIOVASCULAR
We’ve Got Issues With Another Man from the 1800s
What: An excerpt from Dr. Elizabeth Comen’s recent book, All in Her Head, exploring the history of medicine and women’s bodies. This section focuses on how cardiovascular care for women was nonexistent for decades, starting with Wiliam Osler, the physician who in 1889 created the residency model still in use today. But Osler is also responsible for the fact that “cardiac medicine was designed with a male patient in mind, while women presenting with heart complaints were understood to be suffering from neurosis, anxiety, or hysteria.”
Why it matters: As Comen writes: “Today, fully one-third of women will develop heart disease at some point in their lives; for one woman in five, it will be the thing that kills her. That’s not just more than breast cancer; it’s more than all cancers, of every type, combined. A hundred years after William Osler declared that women’s heart failure is all in their heads, it is their leading cause of death: all too real, and all too often overlooked until it’s too late.”
Source: Harvard Gazette
ENDOMETRIOSIS
What Happens If You Still Have Pain After Endo Surgery?
What: Baffler’s Jess McAllen has a deep dive worth spending your time on describing her journey getting diagnosed and surgical treatment for endometriosis. The piece includes many good lines, but I particularly liked this one: “In medicine, as in the culture at large, women’s pain is often treated like the drone of a nearby mosquito: constant and annoying, but an inevitable part of nature.”
Why it matters: McAllen looks at the “cottage industry operating mostly on social media has sprung up” in the absence of good information, and how it affects women who end up going under the knife, especially given that “the recurrence rate of endo tissue after surgery can be as high as 67 percent, yet some surgeons promote their operations as a panacea in jaunty posts and videos.”
Source: Baffler
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