Life Expectancy Hits Record High: “Americans’ life expectancy reached a record high of 78.1 years in 2006, with disparities among ethnic groups and between the sexes generally narrowing, according to government data,” reports the Washington Post.

The overall U.S. life expectancy of 78.1 years was up 0.3 years from 2005. Life expectancy for women was 80.7 years, and for men, 75.4 years. The disparity between the sexes — 5.3 years — has been declining since it peaked at about eight years in 1979.

White women had the longest life expectancy, at 81 years, followed by black women (76.9 years), white men (76 years) and black men (70 years). The gap between men and women is markedly greater in blacks (6.9 years) than in whites (five years).

Plus: Read our previous look at declining life expectancy rates for women in some regions of the United States.

Women Scientists Contribute to New Book on Motherhood: “Motherhood, The Elephant in the Laboratory: Women Scientists Speak Out,” is a newly published collection of essays about science and motherhood, written by 34 women scientists. There’s also a related blog, designed to serve as an ongoing forum for discussion, organization and hopefully change. Via Women’s Bioethics Blog.

This is What We Have to Look Forward to: An on-screen description during a Fox News segment on conservative attacks on Michelle Obama read: “Outraged Liberals: Stop Picking on Obama’s Baby Mama.” In the Understatement of the Month, Fox News conceded that a producer “exercised poor judgment.” See Pam’s House Blend for great commentary and more links.

Plus: The women behind What About Our Daughters have launched Michelle Obama Watch to keep track of the media coverage.

Strawberry Shortcake’s Slimming Makeover: Because even cartoon characters can never be too thin or too young …

Prevalence of Hysterectomies Questioned: “One in three women has a hysterectomy before her 60th birthday. Yet treatment for life-threatening illnesses — uterine and ovarian cancers — accounts for only 10% of the procedures,” writes Anna Clark at RH Reality Check, in this look at the frequency of hysterectomies and the health implications.

Shooting Holes in Protective Gun Bans: From Women’s eNews: Landmark laws passed in the 1990s aimed at keeping guns from abusers have fallen short of their mark, say law enforcement personnel and advocates. Marie Tessier’s story on protective gun bans is the latest in the WeN series on “Dangerous Trends, Innovative Responses.”

“It seems like a great idea, to take guns away from batterers,” says Merril Cousin, executive director of the King County Coalition Against Domestic Violence in Seattle. “It’s more complicated than it sounds, because it depends on finding out that a firearm is involved, it often requires a court order, and then you have to get the order enforced.”

Guns are used to kill most victims of intimate partner homicides, though the proportion has been falling, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

In recent years, about 1,200 women have died annually in intimate partner homicides, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. About a third of female homicide victims in the United States are killed by a partner or former partner. Women ages 25 to 49 are at higher risk, as are African American women and Native American women.

Help Write the History of the Pill: Feminist historian Elaine May is seeking men and women who would be willing to talk about their experiences with the PIll, as well as people who work in fields that relate to its use and availability.

“The Pill is often considered one of the most important innovations of the twentieth century. As I investigate this claim for a new book set for release on the 50th anniversary of the Pill’s FDA approval (Basic Books, 2010) I’m looking to include the voices and stories of real people. I hope yours will be one of them. I’m eager to hear from men as well as women, of all ages and backgrounds,” writes May in her author’s query, published at Feministing.

Speaking of Birth Control …: The question of the day is, “How well do you know John McCain’s views on women’s health?” It’s time get out the facts. Planned Parenthood is launching house parties next week (June 14 - June 20) to help spread the word about McCain’s record not only against abortion, but also against funding for family planning, comprehensive sex education and prescription coverage for birth control. Check out this video from Planned Parenthood:

While struggling to understand her own life and issues, filmmaker Jennifer Fox traveled around the world to see how other women defined and understood their lives.

The result is Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman, a nearly 6-hour documentary that provides an intimate look into the lives of women from many countries, from South Africa to Russia to India to Pakistan.

The film is currently available on DVD, and now (for a limited time only!), if you buy a copy through this link, the filmmakers will donate $3 to OBOS for every DVD purchased.

Happy viewing!

Last month, Vermont directed health insurance companies to cap the out-of-pocket cost of a mammogram, setting the limit at $25.

“Studies suggest cost is a factor in whether women seek and receive mammography services,” Vermont Gov. James Douglas said. “This law is to encourage every woman to get regular mammograms.”

While Vermont’s new law is a step in the right direction, universal, affordable access is still a far-off goal .

OBOB recently looked at the risks and benefits of routine mammograms for premenopausal women in their 40s. Despite the controversy concerning mammograms for premenopausal women, the value of routine mammograms for postmenopausal women is widely accepted.

But not everyone has access to high quality mammograms and, if necessary, subsequent treatment. This month, we’re looking at the cost of mammograms, insurance co-pays and programs that provide low-income women with free mammography and breast exams.

While 80 percent of U.S. women over age 50 reported having a mammogram within the last two years (as of 2006), according to Kaiser’s State Health Facts, this map shows how the percentage varies by state, with Massachusetts at the high end (87.5 percent) and Mississippi (69.7 percent) at the bottom. The states are further broken down by race and ethnicity, though there’s not always enough information available for comparison.

The average cost of a mammogram is between $50 and $150; digital mammograms cost even more. Most states now require health insurance companies to pay all or most of the cost — although for some women, the remaining co-payment amount can stand in the way of making the appointment.

Mammography screening rates remained steady until about 2003 — at that point, the rates started to decline among women aged 50 and older. “I suspect patients’ fear, lack of knowledge of efficacy, physical discomfort during the procedure, denial, geographic barriers, lack of primary care doctor and inability to pay are all factors,” Dr. Alan Sager, professor of health policy and director of the health reform program at Boston University’s School of Public Health, told ABC News earlier this year.

The drop itself may not be a concern if women are making informed decisions about their personal health and are not avoiding mammograms because of cost, said Barbara Brenner, executive director of Breast Cancer Action.

“Falling mammography rates don’t necessarily mean that the sky is falling,” Brenner told OBOB. “After all, in Europe, women are screened less frequently and at older ages, with outcomes essentially the same as we have in the United States in terms of incidence and mortality. Mammography screening has lead to a lot of overtreatment, so the question is about which are the most underserved communities in this context, and conducting targeted screening outreach to them.”

Medicare, which serves people 65 and older and some people with disabilities, pays 80 percent of the cost of an annual screening mammogram for women age 40 and older, leaving most recipients with a co-pay of approximately $10 to $30. Researchers at Brown University in Providence, R.I., looked at 366,475 women covered by 174 different Medicare managed-care plans and found women who have co-payments of more than $10 are less likely to get regular mammograms than those with more generous insurance coverage, ABC News reported.

Here’s the study abstract — and more from ABC:

Mammogram screening rates were about 8 percent lower among women who had to pay more than $10 or 10 percent of a mammogram’s cost, researchers found.

Researchers then examined health plans that once fully covered the costs of mammograms but later switched to only partial coverage. From 2002 to 2004, mammography rates decreased by 5.5 percent in seven of these plans. However, in 14 other plans that continued to offer full coverage of mammograms, screening rates for breast cancer increased by 3.4 percent.

And the number of plans requiring women to make higher co-payments are on the rise. In 2004, one out of nine women was forced to pay for at least 10 percent of the cost of a mammogram out-of-pocket.

The worst impacts were seen among minorities and patients from communities with lower income and education levels, as these patients were mostly likely to enroll in cheaper health insurance plans that require co-payments for mammography.

What about women who don’t have health insurance? At the national level, the National Breast and Cervical Cancer Early Detection Program (NBCCEDP), a program of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, provides mammograms and clinical breast exams by a health professional to low-income, underinsured and underserved women. But the percentage of women reached is far from optimal.

One analysis of the 2002-2003 performance of the NBCCEDP found that:

Although the Program provided screening services to over a half-million low-income, uninsured women for mammography, it served a small percentage of those eligible. Given that in 2003 more than 2.3 million uninsured, low-income, women aged 40-64 did not receive recommended mammograms from either the Program or other sources, there remains a substantial need for services for this historically underserved population.

According to the NBCCEDP, between 8 and 11 percent of U.S. women of screening age (40 to 64) are eligible to receive services. (Women 65 and older are eligible for Medicare.) Federal guidelines establish an eligibility baseline to direct services to uninsured and underinsured women at or below 250 percent of federal poverty level. Contact information for programs in every state is available at the NBCCED website.

Some states provide subsequent funding for uninsured and underserved women to increase access to mammograms and comprehensive screening programs (including breast exams). Eligibility is determined by age and income requirements and varies by state, so it’s best to check with your state health department or your local representative’s office.

Here in Illinois, for instance, access to free mammograms and treatment, as well as clinical breast exams, pelvic exams and Pap tests, was recently extended to all women without health insurance between the ages of 35 and 64 under the Illinois Breast and Cervical Cancer Program.

“No one should have to forgo health screening because they can’t afford it. But screening is only one part of the puzzle,” said Brenner. “If a woman is diagnosed with breast cancer after a low-cost mammogram, how will she pay for her treatment? In California, a woman whose breast cancer is diagnosed after a mammogram administered through a state-run program will be treated at state expense. This isn’t the case in every state .”

Universal health care would solve the problem of women being able to afford breast cancer screening and treatment, adds Brenner.

“I’ve had breast cancer twice, missed in both cases by mammograms. I know how devastating this disease is. But the reality is that this isn’t just about mammography and breast cancer. We shouldn’t have to fight for health care and coverage disease by disease, body part by body part. Everyone should be able to get the care they need — whether it’s screening or treatment — regardless of the health concern.”

A study in the June 2008 issue of Obstetrics & Gynecology examines what happened when women who had an episiotomy during their first birth went on to have a second vaginal delivery. The researchers were interested in whether women who had an episiotomy were more or less likely to tear during subsequent deliveries.

Records were reviewed for 6,052 women who had their first and second deliveries at a Pittsburgh women’s hospital from 1995-2005 (excluding those who had another episiotomy at the second delivery).

The authors found significantly higher rates of an intact perineum or first degree laceration (71.4% combined) at second delivery in women with no prior episiotomy compared to those who had the procedure at first birth (44.2% of these women had no or first degree laceration). Rates of second, third, and fourth degree tears were significantly higher in those with prior episiotomy.

Although the researchers do not provide information on why episiotomies were chosen in the first deliveries, they make the following observation about demographic factors:

Women who had episiotomy at first delivery were older, more likely to be white, married, and have higher education and commercial insurance. These demographic characteristics were also all associated with having a private practice provider, and notably, 94.6% of women who had an episiotomy at first delivery were patients of private practitioners.”

Other risk factors, such as infant birth weight, are mentioned in the paper, although the primary focus is on whether past episiotomy increases risk of future tearing.

What surprised me, given fairly widespread discussion over the past two decades about reducing routine episiotomy, was that when the researchers compiled the records on first and second births over those recent years, 47.8% of them had an episiotomy at their first delivery. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists released a practice bulletin in 2006 recommending restricted rather than routine use of the procedure (after the period of this study). However, literature questioning routine use began appearing in the early 1980s, so I was surprised that it remained so high at the women’s hospital where this research was conducted.

For related discussion, see the Our Bodies, Ourselves: Pregnancy and Birth excerpt, “Why is Maternity Care Like This?”

Press speculation is now underway about the type of first lady Michelle Obama might be (comparisons to Barbara Bush? Please).

Writing at Disability Studies, Penny L. Richards, a research scholar at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, acknowledges that she’s usually not interested in discussing the role of the first lady, but she offers an informative analysis of how the physical disabilities of First Lady Ida McKinley helped shaped the press coverage of her husband’s presidency.

Throughout her adulthood, McKinley had epilepsy, intense headaches and phlebitis, which made walking difficult. She was also under great emotional stress: Both her daughters died young in the 1870s; her only brother was murdered. Richards notes that she was probably overmedicated with sedatives.

A discreet press was mostly silent about her “fainting spells,” and “a special campaign biography” of her was released to frame her health in the most gentle terms. Reporters, forbidden to write about her health, instead focused on her gowns. Her husband, President William McKinley, was devoted to Ida’s care: like many partners, he could see the subtle signs of an impending seizure, and knew how to cover for her during required periods of rest. And that devotion became part of his public reputation. Even her absence on the campaign trail was seen as helpful — a gap that reminded voters of the candidate’s tender personal life. Her “frailty” was held up as ladylike and unthreatening, in contrast to Mary Baird, Mrs. William Jennings Bryan, the trained lawyer and reform-minded woman who was rumored to write her husband’s fiery speeches. [...]

Privately, some in Washington read Ida McKinley as a manipulative “invalid,” using her perceived delicacy to demand indulgences (think of Zeena in Ethan Frome for a well-known literary version of this archetype). She would appear at state events propped in a velvet chair, with the understanding that she would neither rise from her seat nor shake hands. She wore luxurious lacy gowns and jewels, to enhance her persona as a fragile beauty. (She was the first First Lady to appear in newsreels, so she had a much wider audience for her fashion choices than previous First Ladies). Ida McKinley crocheted a lot — a fine sickbed tradition; while in the White House she reportedly made 3500 pairs of slippers to raise money for charities. There’s some evidence that she was sedated not only for medical necessity but to control her “irrational” personality.

Despite her husband’s devotion, the story of Ida McKinley seems to be a lesson in the early power of image and how the first lady becomes the most acute projection of our gendered desires.

For additional reading, Richards lists sources on McKinley and on the representation of feminine illness.

* * * * * *
In other news …

- “Three islanders from Lesbos told a court Tuesday that gay women insult their home’s identity by calling themselves lesbians,” reports the AP. “The plaintiffs — two women and a man — are seeking to ban a Greek gay rights group from using the word ‘lesbian’ in its name.”

- Some great feminist events in New York this week, via Feministing.

- Following up on the study we mentioned last week on how well journalists cover health news, I wanted to mention that the study’s lead author, journalism professor Gary Schwitzer, has his own blog, in addition to publishing Health News Review.

Yesterday’s New York Times included the piece, Researchers Fail to Reveal Full Drug Pay, which explained that renowned Harvard child psychiatrist Dr. Joseph Biederman had failed to report money accepted from the makers of antipsychotic drugs.

The National Institutes of Health, which is the major U.S. funder of medical research, requires researchers to disclose of earnings over $10,000 per year to their universities, such as when they receive payments from the makers of drugs they are studying. Senator Charles Grassley has been investigating the financial relationships between drug companies and researchers, and explains in his report to the Senate Finance Committee that what initially looked like “a couple hundred thousand dollars” received by two psychiatrists was eventually found to be much more:

Dr. Biederman suddenly admitted to over $1.6 million dollars from the drug companies. And Dr. Spencer also admitted to over $1 million. Meanwhile, Dr. Wilens also reported over $1.6 million in payments from the drug companies. The question you might ask is: Why weren’t Harvard and Mass General watching over these doctors? The answer is simple: They trusted these physicians to honestly report this money.”

The document also notes that in some cases researchers have received federal grant money to study a drug while also accepting money from the pharmaceutical company that makes the drug under investigation.

Sen. Grassley previously introduced the Physician Payments Sunshine Act [S 2029] last fall to require more transparency in payments made to physicians by manufacturers of drugs, devices, and medical supplies, and to make the resulting information available to the public through an online registry. The bill was referred to the Senate finance committee; companion bill HR 5605 has been referred to the House subcommittee on health.

Wide Disparities in Health Care by Race and Region: “Race and place of residence can have a staggering impact on the course and quality of the medical treatment a patient receives, according to new research showing that blacks with diabetes or vascular disease are nearly five times more likely than whites to have a leg amputated and that women in Mississippi are far less likely to have mammograms than those in Maine,” reports The New York Times.

The study was conducted by researchers at Dartmouth and was commissioned by the nation’s largest health-related philanthropy, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which announced a three-year, $300 million initiative intended to narrow health care disparities across lines of race and geography.

Repairing the Damage, Before Roe: “With the Supreme Court becoming more conservative, many people who support women’s right to choose an abortion fear that Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that gave them that right, is in danger of being swept aside,” writes Waldo L. Fielding in this op-ed. “When such fears arise, we often hear about the pre-Roe ‘bad old days.’ Yet there are few physicians today who can relate to them from personal experience. I can.” Read on.

Legal Effects of Marriage for Same-Sex Couples: The San Francisco Chronicle has a comprehensive run-down of the legal and financial changes same-sex couples face if they get married in California.

Plus: What happens to the status of couples already married if the November initiative to ban same-sex marriage passes? Expect heavy litigation and a decision ultimately decided by the California Supreme Court, says UCLA law professor Brad Sears.

Paying for Health Care in Retirement - Good Luck: “I write about health care, and still the realization hit me like a ton of bricks today after I put down a just-released report from the Employee Benefit Research Institute. None of the presidential candidates have been talking about how to fix Medicare," writes Judith Graham at the Chicago Tribune.

Here’s the sobering EBRI report (PDF), effectively titled: “Savings Needed to Fund Health Insurance and Health Care Expenses in Retirement: Findings from a Simulation Model.”

On Becoming a Woman: In case you were looking for some, er, real-life advice, Blinky has excerpts from this 1950’s guide. Here’s analysis from Echidne, who calls it “a fascinating trip into the sexual politics of the past.”

“On the other hand,” she adds, “almost everything in those excerpts is advocated in this country somewhere, right this very moment. Abstinence is the responsibility of girls, for example. Women gentle and home-directed while men are strong and outer-directed? I was just told this by a liberal guy.”

Speaking of Abstinence: The National Abstinence Education Association has launched a $1 million campaign to recruit 1 million parents to “lobby local schools to adopt sex education programs focusing on abstinence and to work to elect local, state and national officials who support the approach,” reports the Washington Post.

The campaign comes as Congress is debating whether to authorize about $190 million in federal funding for such programs, which have come under increasing criticism because of a series of reports that concluded they are ineffective. Such criticism has prompted at least 17 states to refuse federal funding for such programs.

The group hopes to counter that trend, in part with a provocative video that asserts that comprehensive sex education encourages sexual activity by teenagers and a Web site that offers advice to parents about sex education.

Plus: Five days later, the same WaPo reporter, Rob Stein, wrote a page-one story about a new study by the Centers for Disease Control that found “a decade-long decline in sexual activity among high school students leveled off between 2001 and 2007, and that the rise in condom use by teens flattened out in 2003.”

The new figures renewed the heated debate about sex-education classes that focus on abstinence until marriage, which began receiving federal funding during the period covered by the latest survey and have come under increasing criticism that they are ineffective.

“Since we’ve started pushing abstinence, we have seen no change in the numbers on sexual activity,” said John Santelli, chairman of the department of population and family health at Columbia University. “The other piece of it is: Abstinence education spends a good amount of time bashing condoms. So it’s not surprising, if that’s the message young people are getting, that we’re seeing condom use start to decrease.”

Not surprisingly, proponents of abstinence-only programs blamed comprehensive sex-ed.

Hands Up if You’ve Experienced Street Harassment: The F-Word is gathering comments here, in response to comments here.

Breast Cancer News from ASCO Conference: Several breast cancer-related studies presented at the annual American Society of Clinical Oncology conference in Chicago are summarized here by Daily Women’s Health Policy Report. Meeting abstracts from the conference are available here.

Eat Locally, Think …: “The local food movement typically has been about improving the health of the planet,” writes Tara Parker-Pope. “But now researchers are trying to find out if eating locally farmed food is also better for your health. A team of researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has received a grant to study the public health impact of moving toward a local, sustainable food system.”

Chicago can’t hold a carrot stick to California when it comes to the availability of locally grown produce, but the farmers markets rock during the summer and fall. How ’bout where you live?

If I Could Be Anywhere Right Now: It would be here.

It’s thrilling any time Our Bodies Ourselves receives a positive mention. But we admit to total giddiness over the beginning of Linda Gordon’s article in The Nation:

“The progressive social movements of the last half-century produced millions of pages of print, from manifestos to journalism to novels, but nothing as influential as Our Bodies, Ourselves. The feminist women’s health manual is the American left’s most valuable written contribution to the world. This claim is meant to be provocative, of course, but it’s true. The publication of an excellent book about the book, Kathy Davis’s The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How Feminism Travels Across Borders, makes this a good time to examine its impact.”

Gordon, an author and professor of history at New York University, does a terrific job of summarizing Davis’ book, which features the stories of women’s groups throughout the world that have adapted “Our Bodies, Ourselves” and highlights the work of OBOS’s Global Translation/Adaptation Program:

If Our Bodies, Ourselves had retained its original authorship, the homogeneity of the original Boston-based CR group — in class, race and nationality — would have limited its appeal. The group’s concern with women’s concrete experience led them to gather many personal reports, so the book’s sources grew increasingly varied. As activists in other countries discovered the book, they asked for versions in their own languages. As Davis recounts in her history of the book’s global expansion, the original authors soon came to understand how saturated their book was with the perspective of educated, middle-class, white American women.

In fact, the group’s initial chutzpah in challenging medical authority was partly a product of these women’s privilege. As their global sophistication increased, the Boston group came to a new understanding of what “translation” requires: Words, sentences, images and anecdotes have different meanings in different contexts. What was oppositional and radical for the Boston authors, such as challenging mainstream medicine, made no sense to women who lacked access to medical care.

The authors realized that you could not just hire a translator, or allow publishers in other countries to hire translators. The non-English versions of Our Bodies, Ourselves were adaptations, and they could emerge only from protracted discussion. The authors work closely with “translators,” discussing how to present controversial material and providing help with publishing arrangements, information resources, graphics, fundraising and connections with activists worldwide.

And Gordon’s conclusion, which follows an important discussion of women’s health in poor and developing countries, is as inspiring as the intro:

As the feminist slogan goes, “Women deliver.” In other words, when women control resources, the social gain is greater than when men control resources. Improving health for the poor is as likely to produce progressive change as any other strategy, because health activism these days requires challenging the world’s most powerful and destructive forces. Matters of the body are politically fundamental. If Our Bodies, Ourselves contributed even in a small way to activating women globally, American feminists can feel proud.

Please read the full article, available online and in the June 16 issue of The Nation. You can also read the final chapter of Davis’s book, “Transnational Knowledges, Transnational Politics” (PDF), at our website.

Our Global Translation and Adaptation program is currently facilitating adaptations in Turkey, Nepal, Israel, Nigeria and Bangladesh, among other countries. To find out more, or to read excerpts or contribute to these projects, visit the program homepage.

As Christine mentioned last week, the D.C. Abortion Fund and Our Bodies Ourselves sponsored a recent discussion on “Intentional Motherhood: Connecting Abortion, Pregnancy and Birth.” Speakers included OBOS Executive Director Judy Norsigian, Alexis Zepeda, board member, D.C. Abortion Fund, and Jill Morrison, senior counsel, National Women’s Law Center.

Jill has posted her remarks from the event at the Womenstake.org blog of the National Women’s Law Center. She describes the cases of Angela Carder, a woman dying of cancer at 25 weeks pregnant who was forced to undergo a court-order c-section, and Laura Pemberton, who was also forced to have a c-section after being removed from her home by police.

As Jill explains:

“The right to decide to terminate a pregnancy, and the right to decide how to be pregnant and how to give birth are merely points on the continuum of reproductive choice. If you start looking at the efforts of some doctors, some law enforcement officials and some judges to control women’s bodies, our unity of interests becomes painfully clear.”

Our thanks go to Jill for her participation and remarks on connecting abortion and birthing rights; go check out her blog post for more.

Daily news stories about new health treatments, tests, products and procedures may be harmful to your health.

That’s the conclusion of a new study published in PLoS Medicine.

An analysis conducted by Health News Review of 500 stories by major U.S. print and broadcast outlets found that between 62 and 77 percent of stories published during a 22-month period “failed to adequately address costs, harms, benefits, the quality of the evidence, and the existence of other options when covering health care products and procedures.”

Here’s a handy table that shows the failures and a few semi-successes.

On the plus side, 70 percent of stories avoided “disease mongering” and 70 percent discussed availability of the new approach.

The study includes examples of stories that scored poorly and offers a prescription to do better: “Time (to research stories), space (in publications and broadcasts), and training of journalists can provide solutions to many of the journalistic shortcomings identified by the project.”

The study’s lead author is Gary Schwitzer, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota School who publishes Health News Review. The Review monitors health coverage by the top 50 U.S. newspapers (by circulation); the Associated Press; TIME, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report; and morning and evening newscasts of ABC, CBS and NBC.

For more reading, see a related blog post at the Wall Street Journal and this story from Minnesota Public Radio.

Plus: A related PLoS editorial looks at the origins of unbalanced reporting and the role of medical journals. The editorial concludes:

Schwitzer’s alarming report card of the trouble with medical news stories is thus a wake-up call for all of us involved in disseminating health research — researchers, academic institutions, journal editors, reporters, and media organizations — to work collaboratively to improve the standards of health reporting. The good news is that there are signs of change.

Two years ago, Ray Moynihan and David Henry guest-edited a special PLoS Medicine theme issue on disease mongering, the corporate creation of new diseases in order to sell treatments. As they report in this month’s issue, over the last two years there has been a growing number of high-profile articles on disease mongering, suggesting that “scepticism is building within the mainstream media.” The Wall Street Journal, for example, recently ran a story on a new drug for restless legs syndrome under the headline “How Glaxo Marketed a Malady to Sell a Drug.”

Read the essay, “Disease Mongering Is Now Part of the Global Health Debate.”

Yesterday’s New York Times includes an article profiling Peggy Robertson, a woman seeking individual insurance coverage who was denied by the Golden Rule Insurance Company because of a past cesarean section.

Federal HIPAA law prohibits exclusion based on pregnancy as a pre-existing condition, but this aspect of the law is focused on group health plans rather than individual coverage. The piece reports that another insurer, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida, “used to exclude repeat Caesareans, but recently began to cover them — for a 25 percent increase in premiums for five years. Like Golden Rule, the company exempts women if they have been sterilized.”

I find this extremely troubling, because it appears that some insurers are using this tactic to simply deny coverage to pregnant women. Women with a past cesarean may have future vaginal births (if a covered facility permits them) or have no further children (without having been sterilized), so insurers who deny coverage based on a past cesarean are essentially excluding all women with past c-sections who might ever become pregnant.

In fact, the Times reports that Robertson received, “A letter from the company explained that if she had been sterilized after the Caesarean, or if she were over 40 and had given birth two or more years before applying, she might have qualified.” In other words, if it were unlikely that she could or planned to have more children, she would have been eligible, regardless of how those children might have eventually been born.

Perhaps these companies should charge more of men who might get a woman pregnant who might need a c-section, because it might one day cost them something for these men to successfully reproduce! Don’t forget denying coverage to the resulting children - they might get sick one day!

New York Governor Faces Suit Over Same-Sex Marriage Order: “An Arizona-based conservative Christian group said on Friday that it planned to sue Gov. David A. Paterson to block his directive to state agencies to recognize same-sex marriages performed outside New York,” reports The New York Times.

The group suing is the Alliance Defense Fund, which was founded by the Rev. James C. Dobson and others, all of whom are for limiting marriage to heterosexuals. The story also discusses how Senate Republican leaders plan on responding to the governor’s directive. Read our earlier post about plans in New York to recognize (but not yet allow) same-sex marriage.

The Rest of Us: In today’s Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, Rebecca Steinitz describes how mothers without an army of nannies and who have not “opted out” make it through summer vacation.

[I]t’s neither superwomen nor supermoms that I see when I drop my younger daughter off at school. While the first-graders zoom around us, I strategize about summer vacation with the preschool teacher and the nurse, the freelance film producer and the nutritionist who’s currently managing her husband’s plumbing business, the law professor and the stay-at-home moms — not to mention the dads. And, tales of mommy wars notwithstanding, we’re all talking to one another.

Do I live in some anomalous corner of working motherhood? I don’t think so. Despite frequent sightings of weekday-morning stroller-pushing moms and the much-ballyhooed dip of about a percentage point in the rate of women in the workforce between 2000 and 2004, statistics show that more than two-thirds of mothers work.

The story is chock-full of good statistics. Give it a read.

Do All Women Have the Right to Become Mothers?: “In many ways, access to and the affordability of infertility treatments speaks to our society’s view of who is considered worthy of motherhood,” writes Pamela Merritt at RH Reality Check.

Decades after eugenics was debunked and fell out of favor as a movement to “improve society,” the residue lingers: there is a strongly held belief that pregnancy and income should be connected. President Reagan tapped into that sentiment with his infamous comment about a “welfare queen,” but the core belief is as old as the American Dream: people who are poor are considered lazy, deserving of poverty and undeserving of anything it takes money to buy. Low-income women who are faced with infertility and seek treatment are suspected of trying to work the system and defraud society.

Plus: On Tuesday, June 3, RH Reality Check and Americans for UNFPA will host an online forum at 1 p.m. on global women’s health and the Republican and Democratic Party platforms. “Are the World’s Women Part of Our Political Agenda?” kicks off with a video statement from Anika Rahman, Americans for UNFPA president, and the insights of Democratic and Republican activists about their parties’ treatment of women’s issues. Rahmam will monitor the comments section through 4 p.m. to follow the discussion and respond to ideas on how to prioritize women’s health internationally.

Two Kinds of End-Of-Life Care: “There are two starkly different paths toward death in New York City’s hospitals, one for patients at elite private institutions, another for those at public hospitals, according to new data compiled as part of a consumer rating system,” reports The New York Times. Anemona Hartocollis and Ford Fessenden write:

Most elderly patients in their last two years of life have more intensive treatment, more tests, more days of hospitalization — and more out-of-pocket costs — at private teaching hospitals like N.Y.U. and Lenox Hill than their counterparts at Bellevue and the city’s other municipal hospitals, which have historically served the neediest New Yorkers. [...]

The rankings, compiled by Consumer Reports from a 15-year research project based at Dartmouth College, have huge implications for administrators, doctors and patients as they consider which model of care is best for those suffering from chronic, fatal illnesses like cancer, congestive heart failure, lung disease and dementia.

The study does not address the question of whether longer stays and more intervention prolong patients’ lives, and the Dartmouth researchers argue, in general, that less-aggressive treatment does not change.

Holy Smokes!: New York state on Tuesday will almost the double the tax on cigarettes — to $2.75 from $1.50, putting the price of a pack of cigarettes in New York City to around $8.50 (that also includes a $1.50 city tax).

From City Room: "It’s not clear whether the messages will have much effect on die-hard smokers, but social scientists have concluded that raising the cost of cigarettes has been a strong factor in bringing down the smoking rate. The city believes that cigarette-tax increases in 2002 helped bring about a 21 percent drop in adult smoking and a 52 percent drop in smoking among public high school students in the city."

Plus: World No Tobacco Day was May 31. Here’s more from the World Health Organization.

Did You Have an Abortion in Iowa?: If so, and if you experienced financial barriers at any point in the process, the Emma Goldman Clinic would like to hear about your experience. The information (which can be kept anonymous) will help the clinic in their work to provide assistance to women in similar situations.

Insight and Action: The website of the International Center for Research on Women is a terrific resource for background, research and advocacy information on issues such as HIV/AIDS, poverty reduction and violence against women.

The organization also features a special section on child marriage, which includes this photo exhibit as well as this six-minute video with images taken by award-winning photojournalist Stephanie Sinclair that depict the lives of girls in Afghanistan, Ethiopia and Nepal who marry as children.

Screening for Domestic Abuse: Erin Marcus, associate medical director of the Institute for Women’s Health at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, writes in The New York Times about the need for better methods to screen patients for domestic abuse.

"Those who support routine questioning say domestic violence is as or more common in women than many diseases for which doctors regularly check, including breast and colon cancer, and its health risks are well documented," notes Marcus. "Despite these recommendations, screening for domestic abuse in seemingly healthy women is nowhere near as widespread among doctors as testing for breast cancer or high cholesterol."

Who is the EPA Protecting Again?: Here's a story I meant to highlight earlier — an Environmental Protection Agency official told a Senate committee hearing in May that there’s "a distinct possibility" the EPA would not limit the amount of perchlorate, a toxic ingredient of solid rocket fuel, that is allowable in drinking water. Percholate is found in food crops, as well as human breast milk and baby formula. The L.A. Times has coverage of the EPA sitting on its hands:

State officials and water suppliers across the nation have been waiting for the EPA to set a standard for several years because perchlorate has contaminated the water supplies of at least 11 million people. Last
year, California, impatient with the EPA’s indecision, set its own standard.

Benjamin H. Grumbles, the EPA’s assistant administrator for water, said the EPA would decide by the end of the year whether to regulate perchlorate. Scientific studies have shown that the chemical blocks iodide and suppresses thyroid hormones, which are necessary for the normal brain development of a fetus or infant.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who chairs the committee, is understandably ticked:

"Congress will not sit idle while EPA fails to adequately protect our children. We must step in to require action that will ensure that our children and families can turn on their taps and be assured that what comes out is safe to drink," Boxer said.

Much of the water contamination comes from military bases and aerospace plants, as well as fireworks companies.

The Pentagon and its contractors for years have been lobbying against a federal standard, saying there are no proven health effects at levels to which people are exposed, and that cleaning up perchlorate could cost billions of dollars.