The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) has long studied the various potential health effects of low-level exposure to chemicals called endocrine disruptors that interfere with development and function. These substances, both natural and man-made, include pharmaceuticals, dioxin and dioxin-like compounds, polychlorinated biphenyls, DDT and other pesticides, and plastics such as bisphenol A (BPA).

Very little action has been taken on the basis of these studies, but new legislation working its way through Congress aims to change that.

The Endocrine Disruption Prevention Act of 2009 was introduced last December in the Senate (S-2828 [pdf]) by  Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and in the House of Representives (HR-4190 [pdf]) by Rep. Jim Moran (D-Va.).

TEDX , the Endrocine Disruption Exchange, provides a thorough overview:

Simply put, the main purpose of the program proposed in the bill is to develop reliable and reproducible methods to identify chemicals that can disrupt the human endocrine system. These protocols will:

• address the full range of possible health outcomes (including reproductive, behavioral, intellectual, metabolic, and endocrine disorders);
• be sensitive enough to detect effects at exposure levels relevant to human exposure (and not rely on the assumption that a lower dose produces less effect);
• consider the effects of exposure to multiple chemicals

The program will rely on a panel of scientific experts, free of conflict of interest, to design research efforts that will be conducted at the NIEHS and on academic campuses across the country. The panel will then evaluate the findings and determine their level of concern (taking into account routes and sources of exposure).

Kerry recently sent a letter to other members of the Senate looking for co-sponsors of the bill. TEDX is urging everyone to call their senators and encourage their sponsorships. And while the House bill has several co-sponsors, more is always better. See “How You Can Help.”

To get a feel for the full political context, read Elizabeth Grossman’s call for “Fixing Our Broken Chemicals Policy,” inspired by the introduction of the bill.

As we know, the majority of U.S. counties lack an abortion provider, and ensuring that proper training in the procedure is available to future healthcare providers is one key aspect of making and keeping abortion available. As the new school year approaches and new medical and nursing students are arriving at campuses all over the country, we thought we’d list resources for students interested in organizing to promote and protect abortion training in their programs. Two organizations working hard to provide information and resources on abortion training and availability are Medical Students for Choice and Nursing Students for Choice.

Medical Students for Choice provides student organizing resources including tips on curriculum reform and tools for student leaders, a list of U.S. and Canadian ob/gyn and family practice residency programs that offer abortion training, recommended reading, and other tools and support. The organization is also on Facebook and Twitter.

Nursing Students for Choice is a relatively new organization that focuses on reproductive health training for nursing students. Their website provides resources for getting involved and for starting campus chapters. The organization also has a new blog as well as Facebook presence.

Via @NLIRH, we learned that the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, California Latinas for Reproductive Justice and the Colorado Organization for Latina Opportunity and Reproductive Rights have teamed up for the first annual Latina Week of Action for Reproductive Justice, starting today and running until August 15th.

As part of the week, the groups are asking supporters to contact their Congressional representatives “to ask the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to support comprehensive family planning services that include contraception as a key women’s health service under the Women’s Health Amendment.” As with many online action campaigns, you can put in your zip code to identify your Representative and Senators and send them a letter explaining that “Latinas, immigrants, and women of color will be disproportionately affected if contraception is not made affordable and accessible.”

There is also an online conversation about Latinas and contraception happening all week, with an inaugural blog post, My-So-Called-Sex-Education, up at Nuestra Vida, Nuestra Voz (NLIRH’s blog) on the need for information about and access to contraception. Further discussion will happen on Facebook, via Twitter (#latinaRJwk), and on partnering blogs such as VivirLatino. There are in-person events taking place in a few cities; check out this page for details.

The Health on the Net foundation is conducting a survey of how people (both health professionals and patients) use the Internet for finding and accessing health information. They estimate that the survey will take 10-15 minutes, and it is available in both English and French.

You may have seen HON code certification on some health-related websites; the certification denotes that the site has met certain criteria for credibility and transparency, and has applied for certification and been approved. HON provides a list of some of the principles used in evaluating health websites.

Other guides for evaluating the quality and reliability of health information websites are provided by the National Library of Medicine (my current favorite, available in English and Spanish), the National Cancer Institute, and the Medical Library Association. NLM also provides an online tutorial with more visual examples (although I can’t seem to find captions or a transcript for the audio track).

If you’re interested in reading more about how people are using the internet for health information, the Pew Internet & American life Project provides commentary, presentations and reports on topics such as chronic disease, social media, e-patients, and the use of the web for health information in general. Additionally, e-patients.net is a great place for kind of geeky discussions by patients on how to become more informed about their health (largely via the internet) and more engaged in their own care.

Earlier this week, the so-called “Pro-Life Freedom Ride” (alluding to the civil rights freedom rides) arrived at the King Center in Atlanta to demonstrate in opposition to abortion rights. The “freedom ride” campaign is being organized by Priests for Life to “build…on a method that the Civil Rights Movement used effectively forty years ago,” and consists of anti-abortion activists taking a bus to cities “with strategic significance for the movement” (such as Atlanta and Birmingham) to demonstrate against abortion.

The “ride” to Atlanta follows up on previous efforts in the state targeting women of color with the goal of restricting abortion. Atlanta was the target earlier this year of an anti-abortion billboard campaign targeting Black women by referring to Black children as an “endangered species.” Also this year, race-focused anti-abortion legislation was defeated in the state; it was opposed by groups of women of color including SisterSong, SPARK, and SisterLove, who were also active in organizing protests of the “pro-life freedom rides.”

Loretta Ross of SisterSong filed this report {PDF] from their protests of the “Ride” at this week’s events, writing that:

…it was surreal seeing all these white folks carrying signs that said “Abortion is the #1 Killer of Black America.” Can you imagine the optics of the scene? Here’s a group of white folks claiming to save Black babies being protested by mostly African American women and men who are shouting “Trust Black Women!”? Once we saw their signs, Paris instantly created a new chant: “Racism is the #1 Killer of Black America, not Black Women!”

In a statement [PDF] prior to the event, the organizations wrote that the “rides” were “no more than a ploy to turn back the clock on Black women’s right to reproductive freedom,” and Ross got to the heart of the offense of the event, including the appropriation of an important civil rights legacy in the service of restricting the rights of women of color:

We are offended by their cynicism, opportunism, and outright distortions of historical facts. Both Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King firmly supported reproductive justice for women. Lies by anti-abortionists, no matter how often repeated, cannot change those historical facts.

As Dazon Dixon Diallo of SisterLove stated:

The actions planned by Priests for Life [the group organizing the rides] are insulting, disrespectful, and completely antithetical to the struggle for women’s human rights. They should be ashamed of themselves, and it is our job as Black women and people of color to shame them!

We would expand that to it being the job of *all* people who are pro-choice advocates for human rights and reproductive justice to resist these campaigns.

For more, see:

• SPARK Reaffirms the Agency and Power of Black Women and our Civil Rights Legacy
• SisterSong has photos from the event on their Facebook profile
• Anti-choice “Freedom Rides” Distort the History and Message of Civil Rights Movement – from the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health

If you’re in Massachusetts, please ask your state representative to urge House Speaker Robert DeLeo to bring an important midwifery bill to a vote. Text of the bill — House 4810: An Act Relative to Certified Professional Midwives and Enhancing the Practice of Nurse-Midwives – can be found here.

The bill was just released from the House Policy and Steering Committee and is now in Third Reading, chaired by Rep. Vincent Pedone of Worcester.  The legislative session closes on Saturday, July 31. If it’s not voted on by then, the bill would die and have to be reintroduced in the next legislative session.

If you’re able to discuss the bill with your legislator or a staff member, please be aware that some legislators have misinformation about the midwifery bill’s content, especially regarding the items below. Here’s some background:

1. The Massachusetts Medical Society strongly objects to CNMs functioning without direct MD supervision, yet has articulated no sound basis for this objection. Nationally, ACOG already supports the elimination of direct supervision of CNMs by physicians, acknowledging that it is not required for safe practice, and 44 other states no longer have such requirements.

2. Some legislators incorrectly think that the bill would provide new prescription-writing privileges for nurse-midwives — this is not really the case. Nurse-midwives already have prescription-writing privileges but can now exercise these privileges only if an MD is technically providing supervision, which amounts merely to a review of sample prescriptions on a quarterly basis.

Because of hospital accrediting rules, this clause prevents CNMs from admitting patients in labor under the midwives’ own names; prevents CNMs from serving on hospital committees that determine maternity care policies; and bars them from control of their own practice environment. This undermines the ability of CNMs to provide the most effective care. (CNMs already have independent prescription authority in most other states, including New Mexico, New Hampshire, Washington, Arkansas and Oregon, and the District of Washington.)

3. Although the legislation has already been rewritten to accommodate concerns about the age at which a midwife could begin training (it was changed from 18 to 21), legislators are still being misled about this fact. There are, by the way, no such age requirements that we have been able to find in the Massachusetts statutes with respect to the education of nurses.

4. Another objection is that the bill does not require a midwife to carry malpractice insurance. In almost all states, malpractice insurance is not required by statute, and it would be unfair to single out one professional group in this regard. Some would argue that such a requirement would violate equal protection clauses.

Because the “risk pool” of homebirth midwives across the country is small, malpractice insurance has never been available for homebirth midwives, despite the concerted efforts of national and local organizations over several decades. Requiring CPMs to adhere to a standard that is impossible is another mechanism to restrain trade and prevent access to home birth midwives.

Childbearing women who want to be protected by malpractice insurance have the option of delivery in facilities, where such insurance coverage is required. Moreover, the Massachusetts legislature could follow a few other states in making disclosure of this absence of malpractice insurance coverage part of a required informed consent procedure. The malpractice insurance issue is not a credible objection to this bill.

Please share this news, and thanks for taking the time to take action on this important piece of legislation!

The New York Times has published online an extensive article about “The New Abortion Providers” (it will appear in print in Sunday’s Magazine), which I highly recommend reading. Such detailed reporting from a mainstream publication on the struggles of individual medical students and doctors to make abortion an accepted, integrated part of healthcare is quite welcomed.

The story provides both a historical and personal context for understanding the challenges — and the courageous dedication — of women’s health advocates on the frontlines of reproductive health for the past four decades.

Unfortunately, this ground-breaking journalism appears the same week in which we learned the Obama administration is denying abortion coverage for women whose pre-existing conditions will place them in “high risk pools” that have been established through the recent health care reform legislation.

More on that lack of courage in a moment.

But it’s worth pausing on Emily Bazelon’s story. She first outlines the depressing marginalization of abortion providers in the United States that occurred in the decades after Roe v. Wade. In 1973, hospitals made up 80 percent of abortion facilities. Fifteen years later, 90 percent of abortions were performed in clinics. At the same time, medical schools increasingly refused to make abortion training part of their curriculum. By 1995, “the number of OB-GYN residencies offering abortion training fell to a low of 12 percent.”

Even though it was the hard work of the feminist movement that made abortion widely available through clinics, those clinics were never intended to replace the key role of hospitals. And as we’ve seen all too often, clinics are ground zero for harassing patients and abortion providers.

As Bazelon notes, “This was never the feminist plan.”

This is a story, though, with an encouraging ending. While anti-abortion forces forced this marginalization through very public protests and acts of violence, a quieter, grassroots movement has taken hold that is starting to reverse these trends:

Over the last decade, abortion-rights advocates have quietly worked to reverse the marginalization encouraged by activists like Randall Terry. Abortion-rights proponents are fighting back on precisely the same turf that Terry demarcated: the place of abortion within mainstream medicine. This abortion-rights campaign, led by physicians themselves, is trying to recast doctors, changing them from a weak link of abortion to a strong one.

Its leaders have built residency programs and fellowships at university hospitals, with the hope that, eventually, more and more doctors will use their training to bring abortion into their practices. The bold idea at the heart of this effort is to integrate abortion so that it’s a seamless part of health care for women — embraced rather than shunned.

The article goes on to tell many compelling stories and reveal complex personal negotiations and sacrifices.

The comments section of the article is also an essential read, as it provides some key corrective points and additional context. “sadpatient” points out that the article, despite its “sympathetic” stance, still participates in the demonization of second trimester abortions, even though “many women are driven to terminate a dearly wanted pregnancy due to poor prenatal diagnosis.”

“Jenny K,” a member of Nursing Students for Choice, was “disappointed” that the article didn’t mention the role of nurse practitioners and physician assistants. And “CM,” through a personal anecdote, discusses the continuing difficulties of terminating a pregnancy in hospitals that are unwilling to provide separate, specialized facilities.

But the gains noted in the article are undeniable. Unfortunately, the Obama administration’s decision this week to prohibit abortion coverage in Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Pools (PCIPs) — also known as high-risk pools — is a disheartening setback for all those fighting to make abortion accessible and affordable.

The Hill reports that the decision ”came as the National Right to Life Committee and others argued the pools being set up in Pennsylvania and New Mexico would cover elective abortions — something that wasn’t prohibited by the healthcare reform law or the president’s executive order on abortion.”

Jessica Aron, in her enlightening breakdown of the political machinations behind the decision, explains why denying coverage to women in this group is particularly devastating:

Women entering these plans are, by definition, those who have experienced serious medical conditions — so serious that insurers are unwilling to sell them insurance. In other words, those who get pregnant are already at a heightened risk for needing an abortion for health reasons when compared to the general population.

Aron also explains in detail why, even with the executive order that Obama signed as a compromise with anti-abortion Democrats like Bart Stupak, “nothing in the law requires such action” restricting abortion in PCIPs.

It is understandable that the Administration might now feel the need to honor the “spirit” of the compromise that resulted in the Executive Order.  But the whole point of the compromise was to preserve the status quo, which included both restricted and unrestricted spheres of abortion funding.  Moreover, the terms of the agreement were carefully negotiated.  Abortion opponents who participated in the bargaining did not raise concerns about high risk pools or other specific potential sources of federal funding, and they should be able to live with the deal they made.

The worst of it is that the Administration could have at the very least set up something akin to the Hyde Amendment and the PPACA by giving states the option of using state or private money to cover abortion care costs.  Instead, the Administration cited the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan specifically as the controlling precedent for the PCIPs.

The reaction from women’s health advocates has been swift. Judith L. Lichtman, senior advisor of the National Partnership for Women and Families, released this statement:

For the next few years, temporary insurance plans for those with pre-existing conditions will be the best and only way that millions of Americans — including many women of child-bearing age — can get health insurance coverage. It is unnecessary and punitive for the Obama Administration to adopt rules that prevent women from using their own private resources to purchase coverage for abortion services in these plans.

Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, stated:

The very women who need to purchase private health insurance in the new high-risk pools are likely to be more vulnerable to medically complicated pregnancies. It is truly harmful to these women that the administration may impose limits on how they use their own private dollars, limiting their health care options at a time when they need them most. This decision has no basis in the law and flies in the face of the intent of the high-risk pools that were meant to meet the medical needs of some of the most vulnerable women in this country.

Raising Women’s Voices and the National Women’s Health Network are providing avenues for action and key talking points to use when contacting the White House (202-456-1111) and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius (877-696-6775).

Earlier this week, we wrote about the groundbreaking “Friday Nights Lights” episode that dealt more honestly with abortion than most television shows in the past 30 years. We’re pleased to include this reflection by Gloria Feldt, activist, author, blogger and past president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. We hope you’ll follow through on her suggestions to thank NBC for allowing this episode to air.

On a personal note, it pleases me no end that this truth-telling episode appeared on “Friday Night Lights.” The show is based on Buzz Bissinger’s book of that same name, a sociology of the very West Texas town (Odessa, Texas) where I lived for 20 years and the high school (Permian) from which my three children graduated.

Not only do I know Dillon/Odessa and its hardscrabble culture all too well; it was where I moved as a 15-year-old pregnant teen with my new husband. We hailed from an even smaller West Texas town, where our football team was truly the only game around (my high school classmates still play the 8-millimeter film of our state championship game at every reunion, if that gives you a clue). At least Odessa has supermarkets and movie theaters!

Odessa was also where my growing understanding of the complexity of childbearing decisions came full circle — and why, though I loved my children more than anything, I came to realize I would have been a much better parent if I’d waited 10 or 20 years to have them.

My 30-year career with Planned Parenthood began when I became executive director of the fledgling affiliate there in 1974 — an affiliate now headed by a woman who was in my older daughter’s Permian High graduating class.

Sadly, I know from stories I still get from young women that the same time-warped pattern repeats itself: Teen girl wants to please football player boyfriend and gets pregnant. The good news is that these stories now — regardless of what the girl decided to do about the pregnancy — are much more likely to end in a statement of appreciation for having had choices in the first place.

This particular episode of FNL is a testament to the fact that regardless of the reactionary, shaming culture and a media with a rightward tilt, real life women will find a way to save their own lives — even in unlikely places like the fictional Dillon and the very real Odessa.

I’ve sent NBC a note of appreciation and urge all of you to do same. We’re good at reacting when we don’t like something, but less so when there’s a show worthy of applause. Here’s where you can go to send a comment: http://www.nbc.com/contact/general/

The series is executive produced by Peter Berg (the film “Friday Night Lights,” “Hancock”), who also wrote and directed the pilot. Joining Berg as executive producers are Jason Katims (“Roswell”), Brian Grazer (“Frost/Nixon,” “The Da Vinci Code”), David Nevins (“Arrested Development”), Sarah Aubrey (“The Kingdom”) and Jeffrey Reiner (“Caprica”). “Friday Night Lights” is a production of Universal Media Studios, Imagine Entertainment and Film 44, in case you want to target a specific individual.

We recently wrote about a proposed rule change that would protect patients’ rights to choose and designate their own visitors during a hospital stay. The change would make hospital visitation much easier for LGBTQ patients and their partners. At the time, we indicated that while public comment would be open for 60 days before the rule could be made official, the proposal hadn’t been posted yet for comment.

The proposed rule is now posted for public comment at Regulations.gov. Comments are being accepted until 11:59 pm Eastern time on August 27, 2010. Click on “Submit Comment” at the top of the page to weigh in on the proposed rule.

Once comments are submitted and uploaded, you’ll be able to view them here. (You won’t see any just yet, as none have been uploaded as of this writing.) You can also sign up for email alerts on this item and use the “Share” options to post to Twitter, Facebook, and other services.

Our Bodies, Our Blog is delighted to be included on Forbes magazine’s top 100 websites for women – a list of “the most dynamic, inspiring and helpful websites for women.” We were cited for educating readers on women’s health issues through “topical, newsy content.”

Meghan Casserly and Jenna Goudreau write in the intro: “To determine which sites and blogs made the cut we looked for compelling and decidedly female-oriented content, outstanding design, an active community and frequent updates. In short, sheer clickyness.”

What’s really cool is the number of feminist sites on the list, including Catalyst, Feministing, Feministe, Hello Ladies, Jezebel, Salon’s Broadsheet and Women’s eNews. It’s no surprise to us that these sites provide readers with essential news and analysis, but it’s a real delight to see a  media giant recognize their importance and reach — and to know that this list was created with the help of Forbes readers.

Update: In the excitement over being named to the Forbes list, we failed to note the fairly obvious exclusion of a variety of women’s voices. I agree completely with the response that my co-blogger, Rachel, wrote at Women’s Health News, and I’m re-posting it here:

Finally, Renee at Womanist Musings points out that that Forbes list of top 100 websites for women didn’t do much to be inclusive of women of color, trans women, women with disabilities, or other marginalized communities of women, and I think this is a fair criticism of the list, and of those of us (like me, as Our Bodies Our Blog was on it) who were included but didn’t immediately notice/point out how others were excluded or how the list was focused. It’s certainly a kind of privilege that it was an issue that was too easy for me to overlook in my “omg, we got noticed” glee, and something I should be better about.

Read Womanist Musings for the full critique and suggestions of sites that deserve notice.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services this week announced a proposed rule change intended to make hospital visitation much easier for LGBTQ patients and their partners. The rule “would protect patients’ rights to choose their own visitors during a hospital stay, including visitors who are same-sex domestic partners.”

The proposed rule change follows up on an April 15 presidential memorandum requesting, in part, that critical access hospitals and hospitals participating in Medicaid or Medicare allow patients to designate visitors who would receive the same access as “immediate family members.” These participating hospitals “may not deny visitation privileges on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.”

As the memorandum explains:

[E]very day, all across America, patients are denied the kindnesses and caring of a loved one at their sides — whether in a sudden medical emergency or a prolonged hospital stay. Often, a widow or widower with no children is denied the support and comfort of a good friend. Members of religious orders are sometimes unable to choose someone other than an immediate family member to visit them and make medical decisions on their behalf. Also uniquely affected are gay and lesbian Americans who are often barred from the bedsides of the partners with whom they may have spent decades of their lives — unable to be there for the person they love, and unable to act as a legal surrogate if their partner is incapacitated.

Marilyn Tavenner, acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), called the rule “an important step forward in the rights of all Americans to expect equal rights and privileges from the health care system, regardless of their personal and familial situations.”

The proposed rule will be available for public comment for 60 days, after which CMS will review the comments before finalizing the rule. It does not seem to be posted for comment yet at Regulations.gov, but we’ll update this post with the link when it is.

Several prominent blogs have recently covered the story, first reported by Alice Dreger and Ellen K. Feder at  Bioethics Forum, of pediatric urologist Dix Poppas and his research involving clitoral surgery on young girls and young intersex patients to make their genitals less “masculinized” — that is, less large.

The research, conducted at New York Presbyterian Hospital, Weill Medical College of Cornell University, is troublesome for a number of reasons, including lack of indication of an underlying medical problem. In each case, the clitoris was deemed simply  too large, whatever that might have meant to the girls’ parents or the girls’ physicians.

Not only are the surgeries, as well as the accompanying attitudes and ethics, hugely problematic, but there are also issues with the follow-up study, which involved applying a cotton applicator and/or a vibrating device to determine how much nerve sensitivity was retained. Poppas was stimulating the genitalia of young children for the purposes of research, and it’s not clear to readers of the related research papers that those patients had a clear ability to consent or withdraw consent or how the potential for psychological harm was addressed.

The ethics of this research and how it was approved in the first place are quite important. But here’s another issue to consider: The articles in which this research was described were published in The Journal of Urology, a prominent journal, in October 2007 (see “Nerve Sparing Ventral Clitoroplasty: Analysis of Clitoral Sensitivity and Viability,” and “Nerve Sparing Ventral Clitoroplasty Preserves Dorsal Nerves in Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia“).

They appeared online even earlier, in August 2007. The citations were included in the PubMed database, which is publicly accessible. So the news has been out there, for anybody to find and call attention to, for almost three years. But it didn’t cause alarm or outcry until Bioethics Forum, a project of The Hastings Center, brought the findings to the attention of a wider audience.

Another example of an awareness delay is the cervical cancer experiment in New Zealand, in which women with cervical carcinoma in situ were monitored instead of being fully treated (or informed of the lack of treatment), and many of them went on to develop invasive cervical cancer — most without ever realizing they were part of an experiment in the first place. (Here’s a slideshare presentation I did, explaining the experiment).

Initial “natural history” reports from this experiment were published in the medical literature in 1970, but there was little public attention or outcry until two women’s health activists published an investigation in 1987. In both cases, ethically problematic research was published but didn’t attract public attention or outcry for some years after the fact.

What can we do about this? Of course, many of us don’t have access to expensive journal subscriptions to read the full-text of such researchers’ questionable methodologies. We can, however, set up saved search strategies and alerts in publicly available citation databases (e.g., PubMed), and monitor the results for items that ding our warning bells.

There’s a lot of talk currently about e-patients (loosely defined as internet-savvy health consumers) with regards to researching medical conditions and treatments, but perhaps more activist-minded e-patients, and other online activists, should play a role in monitoring the broader biomedical research landscape. We know there are institutional review boards to monitor research on the front end, but what about research such as Poppas’s work, which is approved and published with little fanfare?

So, readers, what topics would you like to see in a search strategy set up to monitor these type of issues? What procedures or terms are always worth a review for the ethics and inclusion criteria? For example, I’d expect any research on prisoners should get a second look, and the combination of the clitoroplasty terms and the age groups in the Poppas citations might raise a red flag.

More broadly, how can women’s health and other human rights activists most effectively monitor the biomedical literature for ethical lapses and violations? I’m interested in hearing your ideas, and am happy to put my medical librarianship skills to work for better monitoring strategies.

The Women Deliver 2010 conference is happening in Washington DC today through Wednesday, focusing on global maternal and reproductive health and featuring great speakers from numerous U.S. and international agencies. I just listened to Melinda Gates wrap up and pledge $1.5 billion in new family planning and maternal/child health grants for next 5 years; an archive of these videos is expected to be posted as well.

The conference is streaming live at http://www.womendeliver.org/conferences/-2010-conference/webcast/. You can follow tweets using the hashtag #WD2010, which are also streaming on the webcast page. I’ve set up archives at Twapper Keeper and What the Hashtag? to save tweets with this hashtag for later review.

We have written previously about the Overlapping Conditions Alliance, a group of nonprofit organizations “seeking to advance the scientific, medical and policy needs of individuals affected by medical conditions that frequently overlap.”

On May 19, the Alliance will launch the Campaign to End Chronic Pain In Women with a goal “to improve the quality of women’s lives by raising awareness of chronic pain conditions that disproportionately impact women, as well as the neglect, dismissal and discrimination faced by women suffering from chronic pain. ”

As a campaign alert explains:

Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), endometriosis, fibromyalgia, interstitial cystitis (IC), irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), temporomandibular (TMJ) disorders and vulvodynia are just some of the conditions that have sidelined as many as 50 million lives and cost up to $80 billion each year. These four either solely affect women, or target women at least four times more often than men.

At a congressional briefing on the 19th, the Campaign will release a report on chronic pain in women. The briefing will be hosted by by Representatives Lois Capps (D-CA), Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Janice Schakowsky (D-IL), and will feature representatives of the four organizations of the Overlapping Conditions Alliance. A website for the campaign will also become available on that date; we’ll update with the link.

Amnesty International, which recently released a report on maternal health in the United States, is asking supporters to contact Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, to ask for the creation of an Office of Maternal Health to “ensure that the country’s maternal health care crisis is addressed in a comprehensive manner.”

In the provided letter, the organization asks for such an Office to work on the following priorities:

• gathering comprehensive data on deaths, complications and performance measures along with an effective nationwide review process;
• ensuring access to timely prenatal care;
• issuing evidence-based protocols for health care providers to prevent, recognize and respond to the leading complications that cause pregnancy-related deaths;
• encouraging home visits in the days following childbirth; and
• vigorous enforcement of federal nondiscrimination laws;
• recommending the necessary regulatory and legislative changes to ensure that all women receive the quality maternal care necessary to reduce maternal deaths in the United States.

Organizations can also sign onto a letter to be delivered to Secretary Sebelius tomorrow by contacting demanddignity@aiusa.org.