More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Residents and staff of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities make up 41 percent of all coronavirus deaths in the U.S.
This ongoing crisis at care facilities across the country has had a troubling hidden effect: the looming mass disenfranchisement of America’s elderly and disabled.
Hospital patients around the world were dying alone, separated from their loved ones whether or not they had COVID-19, because of visitation restrictions aimed at curbing the spread of the virus. So after she landed in the hospital with a broken hip, Parkinson’s disease and the coronavirus, 84-year-old Dorothy “Poogie” Wyatt Shields made a request of her children: “Bring me home.”
The spread of coronavirus in nursing homes disproportionately impacts women: Four out of five people in the senior living workforce, and over two-thirds of those living in nursing homes, are women.
Media, books and the world at-large told me in my mid-sixties that I hadn’t really changed at all, that “sixty was the new forty.” I believed them, and I was shocked by my growing sense of confusion and disorientation.
My personal journey through the transition we dare not discuss compels me to break the silence around menopause.
Today, on World Sexual Health Day, we must prioritize sexual wellbeing as a key component of sexual and reproductive health care—and we must include older women in the conversation.
Yup. You read that right.
Back in 1986 Newsweek made a point of suggesting that for all practical purposes, women are dead at age 40. Women over 40, they wrote, are “more likely to be killed by a terrorist” than get married. And Newsweek had statistics to back it up: Women over 40, they claimed “have a minuscule 2.6 percent […]
Within the next 10 years, the number of people over age 60 will surpass one billion, as the world’s population reaches between seven and eight billion. By 2050, the world’s 80-and-older population will nearly triple. The United States currently has the third highest number of older people (ages 60 and up), but many developing countries […]
A new study finds women over 50 want help negotiating safer sex and need better conversations about sex with healthcare providers. This follows reports of increases in STIs amongst those over 45 over the last few years. Gasp! Women over 50 have sex! And not just inside decades-long marriages! (Figured I’d get that out of […]
