Race, class and gender snake their way into practically everything, and all of these identities come to a critical head with black women and breast cancer. In the past 25 years, the gap between the percentage of African American women and white women who die from breast cancer has only grown wider, with black women [...]
For Breast Cancer Awareness Month, the Ms. blog will be running a series of pieces devoted to the disease and activism around it. Isn’t breast cancer so pretty? Far from it–though cosmetic companies seem to be one of the most prevalent groups championing breast-cancer awareness with beauty products that make you glisten and glitter pink from head [...]
For Breast Cancer Awareness Month, the Ms. blog will be running a series of pieces devoted to the disease and activism around it. It is now October, which means that Halloween is around the corner, the pumpkin decorations are out and … what is that? Oh, the color pink, slathered onto every billboard, advertisement and product possible. [...]
For Breast Cancer Awareness Month, the Ms. blog will be running a series of pieces devoted to the disease and activism around it. It’s fun. It’s flirty. And it grabs a person’s eye. Shirts, baseball caps and rubber bracelets emblazoned with the slogans “Save the tatas,” “Save second base,” “I heart boobies.” With each Breast [...]
Each year, 67,000 women die throughout the world due to complications from botched abortions. This number makes up a damning 13 percent of maternal deaths–deaths that could have been easily prevented if these women had access to safe abortions. Instead, these women were cornered into more desperate methods, with the tragic end result of more [...]
Last Tuesday, Texas Gov. Rick Perry stopped by to lend a little good-old-boy masculinity to the opening of a branch of Houston’s The Source For Women, a crisis pregnancy center (CPC) that Perry touted as the future of Texas’s new Women’s Health Program—a program explicitly designed and intended to serve women who are not, and [...]
When Diane Derzis shut the doors of the New Woman All Women Health Care clinic in Birmingham, Ala., last May, she did not expect the clinic to be shut for good. Derzis, known as the “Abortion Queen” by both her opponents and her supporters in the Deep South, was under investigation by the Alabama Department [...]
Imagine a world in which women trying to avoid unplanned pregnancies don’t have to worry about popping a daily pill that shoots their moods to hell, getting shots, buying condoms that sometimes break or changing a patch. Imagine a contraceptive method with which 99 percent of its users report satisfaction. Sound like a dream? In [...]
Late on Tuesday, a federal appeals court lifted an injunction that blocked a new Texas law from barring federal Medicaid funds to Planned Parenthood and other abortion provider-affiliated clinics around the state. It’s the latest in a string of affronts to women’s health in the Lone Star State, where the lives of Texan women have [...]
In early 2012, the decision by Susan G. Komen for the Cure to cut ties with Planned Parenthood (and then the semi-reversal of that decision), sent the organization into a frenzied state of damage control. Attendance at Komen events declined, donations dropped and the organization immediately sought advice from a former White House press secretary [...]
