Health, Reproductive Rights & Sexuality

From the Huffington Post:

From Medical Xpress:

From the Huffington Post:

By rewriting the rules that govern which strings the federal government can attach to its spending on the state level, Chief Justice John Roberts may have inadvertently prevented a future Tea Party-dominated Congress from executing one of its top priorities, defunding Planned Parenthood.

At the same time, it raises the question of whether the federal government can withhold Medicaid money if a state decides on its own to defund Planned Parenthood. Before Roberts' ruling, no legal scholar would have questioned whether the federal government had the authority to spend its own money or tie any strings it deemed appropriate to it. But after the ruling, it's an open question that will likely be decided in court, legal experts told The Huffington Post.

"I perceive NFIB v. Sebelius as throwing the courthouse doors open to coercion claims," said Nicole Huberfeld, a University of Kentucky law professor. "Because the holding is so dependent on the somewhat unusual facts of Medicaid, and because the court set forth no theory of coercion, I think we will see a lot of challenges in an effort to discover the contours of the coercion doctrine."

The issue raised by Roberts' opinion is whether the federal government can coerce a state into using its federal grant money in a particular way by threatening to withhold that money. For instance, if Congress voted to defund Planned Parenthood through the Title X federal family planning program, but New York wanted to continue sending its federal Title X dollars to Planned Parenthood clinics in the state, could the government withhold all Title X money from New York?

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From USA Today:

It's been 10 years since researchers of the Women's Health Initiative, a large randomized, controlled trial on hormone therapy sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, announced their first findings: that the health risks outweighed the benefits of estrogen plus progestin hormone therapy (HT) in postmenopausal women. Since then, additional research has advanced the understanding of the benefits and risks. JoAnn Manson, one of the study's lead investigators and a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, is the president of the North American Menopause Society. She spoke with USA TODAY's Janice Lloyd about what women need to know to get through the challenging time and to protect their health.

Q: Millions of women stopped taking hormone therapy as a result of the study 10 years ago. Was that a good thing?

A: Although the pendulum may have swung too far, it was a good thing that many women who were inappropriate candidates for HT stopped taking the medications. For example, it was fortunate that many women at high risk of heart attack, stroke, and breast cancer stopped taking HT. However, even young, newly menopausal, and healthy women with significant hot flashes and other symptoms became afraid to seek treatment. Also, many, many clinicians no longer prescribe, or know how to prescribe. This isn't a good situation for young women who are having severe menopausal symptoms. They're going to have trouble finding clinicians who will help them make the most informed decision.

Q: Critics fault the Women's Health Initiative (WHI) for using mostly older women who wouldn't benefit from hormone therapy. But what do you think was one of the biggest takeaways from that study?

A: WHI deserves credit for stopping what was becoming common practice of starting hormone therapy in older women who were at high risk for heart disease because we found it failed to protect them from heart disease, stroke or dementia, and actually increased their risk. We also learned there are major differences in the benefit-risk profile of estrogen alone — used by women who have had a hysterectomy — and estrogen plus progestin, used by women who have an intact uterus. The balance of benefits and risk was more favorable with estrogen alone.

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From CNN:

To gauge the impact of the popular Atkins-style diets on women's hearts, researchers in Greece turned to a food survey completed by more than 43,000 women in Sweden. The women, who were between 30 and 49 years old, recorded the frequency and quantities of food they ate over six months in 1991 and 1992.

Using the survey, researchers calculated which women were eating the least amount of carbohydrates and the most amount of protein. The women were then followed for 15 years on average to see who became diagnosed with cardiovascular disease. The women's food habits were not tracked long-term but did provide researchers a snapshot in time.

The study found 1,270 women developed heart problems. The incidence of cardiovascular disease was 62% higher among women who consumed the least carbohydrates and the most protein, when compared to women who weren’t regularly eating a low carbohydrate, high protein diet. By eating such a diet, the researchers conclude an additional four to five women out of 10,000 develop cardiovascular disease each year.

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From Reuters:

The findings, published Monday in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, point to a need for more aggressive political action and strategies for reducing smoking by a new generation of men and women in all U.S. states, researchers said.

"Yes, we are making progress in reducing death rates for lung cancer, but there is really a new epidemic and we have to pay attention to increasing death rates in women," said Ahmedin Jemal, the study's lead author and a researcher at the American Cancer Society in Atlanta, Georgia.

Lung cancer currently accounts for about one in four cancer deaths in the U.S., making it the top cancer killer, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But lung cancer deaths among both men and women have been steadily declining since the 1990s, a trend usually credited to public health campaigns and state policies, like cigarette taxes and smoking bans, designed to encourage people to quit smoking and discourage young people from starting.

Previous research has shown that women born in 1950 and afterwards are an exception to the recent decline.

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From the PSN blog:

• Prohibiting plans from dropping patients after they get sick;
• Requiring plans to cover preventive care with no co-pays;
• Prohibiting plans from refusing to cover children with preexisting conditions;
• Requiring plans to allow young adults to buy coverage through their parent’s plan;
• Prohibiting plans from imposing annual or lifetime dollar limits on coverage;
• Allowing patients to choose their primary care doctor or their child’s pediatrician;
• Prohibiting plans from refusing to cover emergency care without prior approval from the plan;
• Requiring plans to cover contraception on the same basis that it covers men’s reproductive health care; and
• Requiring plans to give women direct access to ob/gyn preventive care without a referral.

From Inter Press Service:

What does birth control have anything to do with reducing global emissions?

Everything, women around the world would say, because they know how closely linked reproductive health is to issues ranging from poverty and food security to climate change and beyond. This message was precisely what female leaders brought to the Rio+20 conference on sustainable development, but not many were listening, least of all the Vatican.

“The only way to respond to increasing human numbers and dwindling resources is through the empowerment of women,” said Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, former prime minister of Norway and former director-general of the World Health Organisation.

“It is through giving women access to education, knowledge, to paid income, independence and of course access to reproductive health services, reproductive rights, access to family planning,” she elaborated, adding that no other way existed to change the current “pattern of human consumption”.

Female leaders have long been trying to tell the world that sustainable development is not just about deforestation, climate change and carbon emissions. Equally as important to sustainable development are gender equality and human rights, which include sexual and reproductive rights.

But the reality is that globally, 215 million women who want to avoid pregnancy are not using effective methods of contraception. More than two and five pregnancies are unplanned, and approximately 287,000 girls and women die each year from pregnancy-related causes. The world has a ways to go to ensure that women have access to full reproductive rights and health.

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From Kaiser Health News: