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FERTILITY
Egg Freezing’s ‘Failed Promise’
What: Vox’s Anna North does the sweeping look at egg freezing we didn’t know we needed, chronicling the heady days of Bloomberg Businessweek covers claiming women’s careers freed to the less than stellar success rates and yet “another way for companies to make money from stoking women’s anxieties.”
Why it matters: We can’t put it better than this paragraph: “About a decade after it shed its ‘experimental’ label, the procedure has become ubiquitous in pop culture and ballooned in popularity, with over a million frozen eggs or embryos stored in the United States today. It has done little, however, to materially change women’s lives.”
Source: Vox
PREGNANCY + POSTPARTUM
US C-Section Rate Hits Ten Year High
What: C-section rates have increased in the United States to the highest rates since 2013, after previously falling between 2009 and 2019. Just over 32% of births in the US were C-sections in 2023, more than double the rate the WHO says is ideal.
Why it matters: C-sections can be life-saving procedures, but there are financial and time incentives to perform them—and they are major surgeries that typically require a longer recovery period.
Source: Axios
The Blood Test for Perinatal Depression
What: A heath startup published peer-reviewed papers with academic partners arguing that its blood test “uses machine learning to compare epigenetics — how genes are expressed — in your blood sample with benchmarks developed during a decade of research into pregnant people who did and didn’t develop postpartum depression.”
Why it matters: This could simplify and greatly expand perinatal depression diagnoses – but as many point out in the article, identifying women more likely to experience depression won’t matter if they can’t also access treatment.
Source: Washington Post
MENSTRUATION
The Public Policy Element of Period Poverty
What: A reminder that period products in many US states are treated as “nonessential goods,” which means they are taxed (unlike other “essential” goods like toilet paper) and they “aren’t eligible to purchase through WIC or SNAP. In addition, public school bathrooms aren’t stocked with period products.”
Why it matters: This Charlotte Magazine piece opens with the real-life consequences of this—a single parent sending one of three girls to school at a time, because they can only afford products for one at a time.
Source: Charlotte Magazine
ABORTION ACCESS
Florida’s 6 Week Abortion Ban Starts Wednesday
What: Florida’s six-week abortion ban goes into effect on Wednesday, cutting off access to the health procedure not just in the Sunshine state, but across the southern United States. Florida is the third largest state in the United States and performed 84,000 abortions last year—a number that cannot be easily absorbed by other states.
Why it matters: “Clinics are scheduling ultrasounds earlier and ramping up other health care services to try to stay open. Funds are training volunteers to plan travel for patients to Illinois, Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C.,” and most notably, this change could be temporary. Floridians will vote on abortion access up until 24 weeks in November.
Source: New York Times
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