- Shakira Andrea Sison recently published this piece at The Rappler about the still-powerful influence of menstrual shame and stigma.
- Gary Schwitzer at Health News Review takes down the media coverage of the BMJ study titled, “Association of skirt size and postmenopausal breast cancer risk in older women“. Hint: “linked to” does not mean “causes”.
- Adolescents with disabilities are often overlooked in discussions of birth control access, but data show that adolescents with disabilities and chronic illnesses have similar levels of sexual behaviors and sexual health outcomes.
- Between 2011 and 2013, 205 new restrictions on abortion access were enacted at the state level in the U.S. A new report from the Center for Reproductive Rights has found the more abortion restrictions present, the worse a state performed overall on indicators of women’s and children’s well-being — contrary to the stated goals of legislators imposing such restrictions. Download the report here.
- Faux tampon earring provokes faux outrage at xoJane.
- A new study related to the longitudinal Contraceptive CHOICE Project was published in the New England Journal of Medicine this week, show that teens with access to birth control at no cost, especially long-acting reversible methods such as implants and injections, will have fewer abortions. The study has received a great deal of media attention.
- Young women are desperate for contraception: a 22-year-old woman in Colombia recently had to have a potato surgically removed from her vagina after it had grown roots, causing her serious abdominal pain. She placed it there two weeks earlier, on the advice of her mother, as a contraceptive. According to Colombia Reports: The fact that a 22-year-old women was so naïve as to believe that a potato was an appropriate and safe method of contraception shows a concerning lack of education for young people as to the options available for them when they become sexually active.
