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Tag: "#womens news"
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Anne Branigin, Washington Post
December 28, 2021
People with disabilities face much higher risks during pregnancy. Researchers are only beginning to understand how.
A new study fills in gaps about the health risks pregnant women with disabilities face.
Alarming maternal mortality rates in the United States have received increasing attention from researchers, lawmakers and journalists in recent years. But while racial and ethnic disparities have been a central concern for many — Black women are three to four times as likely to die of pregnancy and birthing complications as White women — less research has focused specifically on people with disabilities.
A study published this month fills in crucial gaps about the health risks pregnant women with disabilities face, finding that they have a significantly higher risk of dying from pregnancy and childbirth than their non-disabled counterparts. They were also more likely to experience all the most severe illnesses associated with maternal mortality.
The research, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Network Open, a peer-reviewed, open-access medical journal, found pregnant women with disabilities were at higher risk for a slate of pregnancy complications, including blood clotting, infection and hemorrhaging. They were also 11 times as likely to die of pregnancy or birthing as their non-disabled counterparts.
Jessica Gleason, a research fellow of perinatal and pediatric epidemiology at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, led the study.
To Gleason, the findings highlight the systemic barriers women with disabilities encounter getting medical care — before they ever get pregnant.
“We can’t just put this all down to personal, individual health choices,” she said. “There are a lot of societal factors that contribute to these poor health outcomes and prenatal care.”
To learn more about the risks women with disabilities face during their pregnancies, researchers combed through a large, comprehensive data set of medical records for deliveries from 19 hospitals across the United States between January 2002 and January 2008. They compared the medical charts of 2,074 pregnant women with a documented disability (including physical, intellectual and sensory disabilities) with 221,311 pregnant women who did not.
Earlier studies found women with disabilities had higher risks for a number of pregnancy complications, including preterm birth, hypertensive disorders, gestational diabetes and Caesarean delivery, but not much was known beyond those conditions, said Gleason.
Gleason cautioned that some of the findings, such as the elevated risk of maternal mortality, could be inflated because the total number of women with disabilities in the study was relatively low. But the overall results were consistent across the board: Pregnant women with disabilities faced more severe health outcomes than their non-disabled peers, she said.
Not only were disabled women at higher risk for pregnancy and delivery-related complications — including preeclampsia (a pregnancy-related hypertensive disorder that could be fatal) and gestational diabetes — they were also more likely to have conditions that can lead to death during childbirth, such as heart attacks, infection and blood clotting.
Pregnant women with disabilities also had higher risk of obstetric intervention: Medical professionals were more likely to give patients oxytocin to stimulate labor; use forceps, vacuums and other devices to extract the fetus; or deliver babies via Caesarean sections.
According to Gleason, this data lines up with previous qualitative studies in which pregnant women with disabilities described their pregnancy and birthing experiences to researchers.
“Women with disabilities often are not allowed to attempt vaginal delivery,” noted Gleason. While the data doesn’t explicitly find a provider preference for C-sections, which generally have greater health risks than vaginal births, Gleason said medical records showed women with disabilities were more likely than those without to be given Caesareans without a clearly defined medical reason.
[ 3 women on being disabled in America, in their own words]
This combination of factors — a delivery method that is riskier, plus higher rates of severe maternal illnesses — can create a “perfect storm” that could endanger the lives of pregnant people with disabilities, Gleason said.
In an accompanying paper, Hilary Brown, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto at Scarborough, called the research an “important contribution” to existing knowledge about pregnant women with disabilities.
“Even when these complications do not result in death, they have significant implications for families,” wrote Brown, “including separation of mothers and newborns at a time that is critical for bonding and breastfeeding, as well as potential long-term negative impacts on women’s well-being.”
According to Brown, whose research focuses on maternal and child health for people with disabilities and chronic disease, “women with disabilities have long been ignored in obstetric research and clinical practice.”
“Their invisibility stems from a history of eugenic practices, including institutionalization and sterilization, imposed on people with disabilities throughout the 20th century,” Brown wrote. Today, women with disabilities are still stigmatized when it comes to their sexuality, reproductive health and desire to raise a family, she added.
Research has shown that people with disabilities get pregnant at a similar rate to those without, and that about 12 percent of women of reproductive age have some kind of disability.
But some medical providers have told researchers that they aren’t trained to treat pregnant patients who are disabled. Patients often do not know how their disability or related medications could impact their pregnancy and vice versa, and could have difficulty figuring out the cause of their symptoms. Worldwide, pregnant women with disabilities have reported feeling as though health-care workers dismissed their concerns, lacked the knowledge to help them or seemed unwilling to help.
There are other significant barriers to prenatal care for women with disabilities, Gleason noted. Their families may not support their pregnancy, and when they attempt to get care, their medical provider may not have the facilities, materials or staff to treat patients effectively. The office space or exam table may not be accessible to disabled patients, Gleason said. And some women with visual, speech and hearing impairments have reported that their providers couldn’t communicate with them effectively.
The study, which used data from before the Affordable Care Act was signed into law, also found that pregnant women with disabilities were more likely to live in poverty (other research has shown this is true of disabled people generally).
To help ensure people with disabilities have safer, healthier pregnancies, Brown called for mandatory disability training for obstetricians, midwives and other health-care professionals. More research also needs to be done on the intersection of race and disability, she said: Disability was overrepresented among people of color, who already experience stark disparities in maternal morbidity and mortality.
Gleason said additional research is needed to better understand the causes of these risks, as well as to understand how different kinds of disabilities impact maternal outcomes. But healthier pregnancies start well before a person gets pregnant, she noted.
For example, while people without disabilities may get reproductive health counseling from their primary care provider, which helps them to understand their options and individual risks, the same counseling often isn’t extended to women with disabilities, said Gleason. Some health-care workers have wrongly assumed that their disabled patients are not sexually active.
Having health problems is also “very expensive,” she added, and unless there are larger improvements to living conditions and health-care access for people with disabilities, the impact of smaller interventions could be limited.
“There’s this misconception for women entering prenatal care that this can be the time to intervene on all these health issues,” said Gleason. “We should really be focusing on women’s preconception health in general to improve pregnancy outcomes.”
Anne Branigin is a staff reporter for The Lily. Previously, she worked at the Root covering news, politics, health and social justice movements through the lens of race and gender.
Feminist objectives are possible and have been achieved all around the world. Martha Burk, Ph.D., author of Your Voice, Your Vote, money editor for Ms Magazine, lists what is achievable:
* “I wish to live in a country like Norway, Spain, Germany and 13 others that have subsidized childcare. I wish to live in a country like Estonia, Sweden, Croatia and 38 others that have paid family leave.
* “I wish to live in a country like Britain, France, Israel, Belgium and Iceland, that have free and universal pre-kindergarten. I wish to be in a country like Liberia, Rwanda and South Africa, where people who are not white don’t have to fear law enforcement.
* “I wish to live in a country like Iceland, the Bahamas and Latvia, where women are closest to men in economic empowerment.
* “I wish to live in a country like France, Denmark, Italy and Canada that spend more on social services than they spend on military weaponry.
* “I wish to live in a country like Japan, India and Venezuela where parents don’t have to worry about their kids getting shot at school.
* “I wish to live in a country like Finland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, India, Germany, the Philippines, Norway, Ireland, Iceland and Bangladesh, where women are often heads of state.
* “I wish to live in a country like Austrailia, Argentina, Canada, China, Russia, Sweden and Greenland, where abortion is legal, safe and accessible.
* “I wish that the country I so wish to live in with all of these things would be the United States.”
Intelligent, clear-thinking people will recognize the logic of this sign. However, no one would describe the radical right using either of these adjectives. Wonder what half-a explanation they might come up with in rebuttal?
Once More, with Feeling: The ERA
by Robin Morgan Nov 15, 2021
In 1923, on the 75th anniversary of the 1848 Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, Alice Paul introduced the first version of the Equal Rights Amendment: “Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction.”
The National Women’s Party and professional women like Amelia Earhart, the great pilot, supported it. But other reformers, particularly in the labor movement, who had worked hard for protective labor laws for women, were afraid the ERA would wipe out their progress. (This could have been solved by mobilizing for the extension of protective labor laws to men – like not lifting items over a certain weight or doing especially hazardous labor — but it became a huge sticking point for those protectionists who exploited class divisions within the women’s movement.)
By the early 1940s, both the Democratic and Republican parties had added support of the Amendment as a plank in their political platforms, although opposition was building: social conservatives, who considered equal rights for women a threat to their existing power structure, joined with labor and with leftists fighting for protectionist workplace laws to hinder the amendment. Eleanor Roosevelt agreed with them, and the ERA stalled.
Nevertheless, in 1943, after two World Wars that had seen women pouring into the labor force, the Amendment was reintroduced, this time reworded to reflect language in the 15th and 19th Amendments: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” That’s the whole of it, even today – 24 words
Still, the left and the right remained fairly united in opposition. By the 1960s, young women active in the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement (I was one) began to examine their/our own lives politically and shake the dust of the male left off our boots. We organized as citizens, and politicians started to react to the power of women’s voices in new ways. Mainstream groups joined the call for the ERA–this time including organized labor.
Whew, you exhale. Yes! It was passed by the Senate and the House on March 22nd, 1972, and the proposed 27th Amendment to the Constitution was sent to the states to be ratified! But wait. Congress placed a seven-year deadline on the ratification process. Still, the ERA hit the ground running and got 22 of the necessary 38 state ratifications in the very first year.
Yet as opposition coalesced, the pace slowed. All through the 1970s, ERA opponents like Phyllis Schlafly, right-wing leader of the Eagle Forum’s Stop ERA group, played on fears that had generated opposition back in women’s suffrage days. She and her followers claimed that women would be sent into combat, that contraception use and abortion rights would be required, that same-sex marriages would be upheld, that unisex bathrooms would be mandated, and that the ERA would destroy the family.
State’s rights advocates added that the Amendment was a federal plot, and corporations — particularly the insurance industry — strongly opposed the measure, which they believed might cost them money. Not surprisingly, the ERA was also vociferously opposed by most evangelical and/or fundamentalist religious groups.
Nevertheless, The National Organization for Women (NOW) and ERA America, a coalition of almost 80 mainstream organizations, mobilized skillfully and that same year, Indiana became the 35th state to ratify the amendment. Whew again!
Oops. As the 1970s drew to a close, Illinois changed its rules to require a three-fifths majority to ratify an amendment, thereby ensuring that their previous simple majority votes in favor of the ERA “didn’t count.” Other states proposed or passed rescission bills, despite legal precedent that states lack the power to retract a ratification. All the while, the original 1979 deadline was approaching and, although some groups, like the League of Women Voters, wanted to retain 11th hour pressure as a political strategy, most ERA advocates appealed to Congress for an indefinite extension of the time limit, and NOW coordinated a successful march of 100,000 supporters in Washington DC. Congress granted an extension until June 30th, 1982.
Is that a tentative “whew” I hear? Nope.
The political tide would turn much more conservative, and in 1980 (the year Ronald Reagan was elected president), the Republican Party removed their support for the ERA from its platform. Distinguished Republican feminists walked out of the convention in protest when the party took that plank out of the platform, and Betty Ford denounced the action.
Meanwhile, Reagan never named Phyllis Schlafly to a promised cabinet position, after all.
So, given machinations by the states plus the sharp right political turn, and despite increases in massive pro-ERA lobbying, petitioning, walkathons, hunger strikes, fundraisers, White House pickets, and civil disobedience, on June 30th, 1982, the ERA fell three states short of the necessary 38 for full ratification. It was a significant defeat.
But you can’t keep a good woman down. Two weeks later, the Equal Rights Amendment was reintroduced in Congress, and it’s been reintroduced before every session of Congress since then. In 2017, Nevada became the 36th state to ratify, followed by Illinois and then Virginia made history to become the 38th ratifying state.
Now, attention is focused on removing the deadline. There are also after-the-fact ongoing efforts in several states — North Carolina, Tennessee, Florida — to ratify. Now, gee, everyone claims they want to ratify because after all who could be against equality? Well, the opposition could!
Because the deal is not yet done.
We ourselves were partly to blame in the past: we didn’t fully grasp how state legislatures work, and the importance of redistricting. Wow, were we naïve–the public, not only feminists. Also, we failed to impress sufficiently on Americans the concrete changes that the ERA would bring. Even today, some people say, Don’t women already have equality? Why is an ERA necessary? I’m indebted to Jessica Neuwirth for her excellent book Equal Means Equal: Why the Time For An Equal Rights Amendment Is Now for the clarity and concision of the following examples:
In the absence of an ERA, targeted federal legislation has been used to try to close the gaps, so we women have squeaked in, doing things piecemeal, relying on the Commerce Clause, the Equal Pay act of 1963, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendment, the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act, and the Violence Against Women Act of 1994. While this has helped, these federal laws are neither comprehensive nor fully inclusive (one has been partially struck down by the Supreme Court for lack of a constitutional foundation). Most critically, none of these laws has the force of a constitutional amendment, which means they do not cover everyone and they can be rolled back at any time by a simple congressional vote. Poof! There goes every form of misogynistic attitude and act against women let loose on us–terrifying.
Moreover, the United States is one of only seven countries in the world (along with Iran, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, and two small Pacific Island nations, Palau and Tonga) that have not ratified the United Nations Convention On The Elimination Of All Forms Of Discrimination Against Women, otherwise known as CEDAW. It’s the international Bill of Rights for women, and it has been signed and ratified by 187 countries, virtually every nation in the world except the U.S.
President Jimmy Carter did sign it in 1980 but it must be ratified by a two thirds vote of the Senate to enter into force, yet apparently the United States can’t (or won’t) ratify it since the ERA has not yet passed.
What will the ERA really do? It will enshrine in the Constitution the value judgment that sex discrimination is wrong, require the federal government and each state to review and revise all laws and official practices to eliminate discrimination based on sex, and ensure that governments do not enact future laws that discriminate on the basis of sex. It will be the basis for recognition of the principle that the homemaker’s role in marriage has economic value and that marriage is a full partnership; it will ensure that non-monetary contributions to a marriage, such as household work and childcare, must be considered when a couple’s household goods are divided as a result of divorce; it will ensure that married women can engage in business freely and dispose of separate or community property on the same basis as married men, and it will give the same rights to a woman as to a man in marital law and allow a married woman to maintain a separate domicile for voting purposes, for passports, for car registration, etc. It will ensure equality of opportunity in public schools, state colleges, and universities, employment training programs of federal, state, or local governments, and in governmental recreation programs.
It will ensure equal opportunity, privileges, and benefits in all aspects of government employment. It will ensure that families of women workers receive the same benefits as families of male workers under the Social Security law, government pension plans, and workers’ compensation laws.
What will the ERA not do? Well, fortunately or unfortunately, it will not destroy the family. Neither will it mandate contraceptive use, or insist on abortions for women who don’t want to have them.
Public opinion charged way ahead of Phyllis Schlafly, because women are already in combat, performing with valor. Public opinion also left Phyllis at the starting gate in approving same-sex marriage. Nor will it require coed bathrooms, although when flying 35,000 feet in the air, people willingly use unisex bathrooms, anyway.
And frankly, I would wager that if you ask the average American woman if she would enjoy being discriminated against while pregnant or in case she might become pregnant, if she liked being battered by a violent partner, if she was content to sacrifice equal education, never even to aspire to equal pay, and would guffaw at the notion of equal sports access, she would get damned cranky. Even a great many American men might share that reaction.
As for being informed that the United States ranked with Iran, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, Palau, and Tonga, sharing the humiliated status of not ratifying an international Bill of Rights for the majority of its citizens, again I’d wager that every “red blooded American” would fume with outrage.
I know. We’re tired. The last thing we need is a new cause. But you see, this is an old cause, unfinished. I know that we’re exhausted from COVID and lock-down and climate change crises, and years of Trump and the dreadful aftertaste he leaves in our mouths that still have to swallow some of his Big Lie Republican Party poison. We just want to curl up, squeeze our eyes shut, maybe suck on our thumbs, and listen to a nice fairy tale.
Well, your sunbeam sister here is telling you that the fairy tale will come when all women in this country live free, empowered, and protected by our Constitution. This is one fairy tale we can make come true.
So pick up or order a copy of Jessica Neuwirth’s excellent, thorough, and easily accessible book, and brandish it during Thanksgiving dinner arguments with certain members of that family that has not yet been destroyed. Then drop an email or call your senator, to weigh in as one of what I hope will be many voices saying Now!
Look, if we don’t do it this time, you and I both know we’ll just have to do it all over again, which will really be a drag. Hell is repetition without movement. This is a chance to strike a great blow for democracy in general and for women specifically.
So do it for Alice Paul and Susan B. Anthony and the great Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Do it for all those hunger strikers and civilly disobedient girls and women who acted on their outrage. Do it for daughters and granddaughters–and sons and grandsons, too. But most of all, do it for yourselves.
Hell, yes! Put yourself in The Constitution of the Republic of the United States of America.
The post Once More, with Feeling:
The ERA appeared first on Robin Morgan | Author, Activist, Feminist | NYC.
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