- Anthropologist Kate Clancy explains the myth of menotoxins and the scientific conclusion: Menstruation is just blood and tissue you ended up not using.
- Now that you’ve given up oral contraceptives, here’s a great way to re-purpose all those pills: this couture ball gown was made from an estimated 5,500 pills by the creative team Pharmacopoeia.
- In an apparent preview of her forthcoming book about the subject, Frances Serra Whittelsey discusses what she terms the hysterectomy epidemic at Ms. blog, estimating that about 70% of hysterectomies in the U.S. are unnecessary.
- Those of you active on upstart social network G+ may have seen some discussion of Booberday, the
latest demeaning, exploitative show-your-cleavage-on-the-internet memeonline breast cancer “awareness” campaign; you can read an excellent summary of critical feminist responses at Geek Feminism, expressed most succinctly by Randall Munroe:
The really frustrating thing about the “Save the boobies” campaign and similar ones is that it gets it exactly backward. Often, the point of breast cancer treatment is to destroy some or all of the boobies in order to save the woman.
Saying that we should work to cure this disease because it threatens breasts is really upsetting. For starters, it suggests that women are worth saving because they’re attached to breasts, rather than the other way around. But worse, it tells any woman who’s had a life-saving mastectomy that she’s given up the thing that made people care about her survival. What a punch in the stomach.
- President George W. Bush is forming a public-private partnership among his George W. Bush Institute, the State Department, Susan G. Komen for the Cure and the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS to use the infrastructure of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief to provide cervical and breast cancer screening and treatment.
- Yale researchers experimenting with endometrial stem cells have hadsome success treating diabetes in mice.
- S.A.N.E. Vax responds to Michele Bachmann’s accusations about Gardasil, saying it doesn’t cause ‘mental retardation’: “The correct term is ‘brain damage’ from the neurotoxins in the vaccine crossing the blood-brain barrier affecting the endocrine and autoimmune systems.” Read more here.
