More Than A Magazine, A Movement
In 2021, more than 360 Black women died of maternal health causes across the country, according to the CDC—up from just over 290 in 2020 and more than 240 the year prior.
Despite advancements in medicine and technology over the years, the racial gap in who is suffering the most severe consequences of childbirth is growing, and most Black maternal and child health experts point to systematic racism as the root cause.
The very name of the illness that had so totally derailed my life sounded like a joke, as if it were nothing more than ordinary life in our too-fast age, the complaint of someone too lazy to keep up. The words stung my lips with insult: “chronic fatigue syndrome.”
Though I felt like I was suffering in my own private hell, more than a million Americans shared my fate. Worldwide, the number is estimated at between 17 and 30 million. Though the disease has been characterized as the “yuppie flu,” it is more common in poor people. It occurs in all racial groups and ages but most of us are women—around 80 percent. Hidden in these numbers is astonishing suffering. But public health agencies have treated chronic fatigue syndrome as if it were the jest the name suggests.
Achieving health justice won’t happen by itself. First, we need to imagine it can be done. Then we need to organize and make it happen together.
Menopause has been sorely neglected by the mainstream medical establishment, by lawmakers, by employers and by just about everyone. As a result, millions of women are left to navigate its most debilitating symptoms with little support.
Menopause is clearly having a prime-time moment—and we think that’s worth cheering. We challenge the National Institutes for Health to design and launch a modern initiative to assert the long-term benefits of hormone therapy and accurately assess its risks.
Thirty years ago, a group of determined women ushered the groundbreaking Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) into law after a long fight. While passage of the FMLA was a monumental achievement for its time, coverage and eligibility restrictions mean that over 40 percent of the workforce are excluded from its protections. Advocates hoped the FMLA would lay the foundation for a universal paid family and medical leave program.
Women can’t wait another 30 years. The time for paid leave is now.
By neglecting to collect data on menstruation, researchers are potentially missing key indicators of women’s health.
Menstruation is the “fifth vital sign” in the clinic. It’s time it becomes more than just an afterthought in the laboratory.
Watching the novel-turned-television show Fleishman Is in Trouble now, I am struck by how Rachel’s traumatic birth left the Fleishmans in trouble. Her birth story helped me realize how much my own traumatic birth transformed me as a doctor.
The show helps us feel the absurdity in insinuating that Rachel could have moved on from her delivery simply and gracefully, content to be alive and physically unscathed, perhaps attending therapy to help her cope. Taffy Brodesser-Akner shrewdly summed this all up when she wrote, Rachel “was what this doctor thought she was. She was nothing. She was just a woman.”
Millions of troops and their families stationed on contaminated military installations were exposed to a deadly combination of toxins responsible for triggering fatal illnesses. North Carolina’s Camp Lejeune is perhaps the most notorious example of widespread contamination affecting U.S. army bases.
Congress passed the Honoring Our PACT Act in August to facilitate veterans’ access to improved benefits through the V.A. for service-connected toxic exposure. The bill recognizes 23 new diseases as presumptive conditions—but breast cancer still isn’t one of them.
We have been left all alone, our bodies overlooked by the law and undermined by the courts. We’re left, quite literally, to save our own lives. But perhaps one silver lining of the overturning of Roe v. Wade has been creating space for women to openly and deliberately trace the arc of their reproductive lives—in public—from menstruation to menopause.
As advocates, scholars and providers now work to reimagine and rebuild what meaningful reproductive care looks like in this country, we have an opportunity to be more holistic in addressing the full continuum of women’s reproductive lives. Private sector interventions and public policy solutions must reflect those intersections. Period. Full stop.
Lung cancer is the number one cancer killer of women in the U.S., killing more women than breast, ovarian and cervical cancer combined.
