Health

Understanding how health policies can either exacerbate or improve gender inequities and their intersections with other forms of inequity.

We Need Women’s Leadership More Than Ever During COVID-19

The absence of women’s voices in policy decisions undermines our collective well-being—especially during a pandemic.

Health, Violence

Many Will Die From This Pandemic—Some From Domestic Violence

The pandemic has created a unique environment for lethal violence against women. What’s essential now is COVID-19 responsive support, not more guns.

Criminal Legal System, Health, Violence

Domestic Violence Is Also a Virus

The pandemic has laid bare the many risks of carceral responses to domestic abuse. We can no longer blindly accept that arrest is best.

Health

Changing the Odds for Black Mothers

What will it take to make pregnancy and childbirth safer for Black women and their babies? A new generation of researchers target structural inequalities and implicit bias in health care.

Health

Gender and the “War” on COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic is a wake-up call to expand what investments we consider essential to national security, how we value work, and who gets called a hero.

Health

Gender, Masculinity, and COVID-19

Why are men dying from COVID-19 at higher rates than women? The pandemic raises crucial questions about how gender norms influence health.

Health

Eviscerating Access to Abortion Care Under Roe v. Wade

Even if the Supreme Court does not overturn Roe this year, it could permit so many anti-abortion obstacles that only the wealthy will be able to access full reproductive health care.

Health

Inequities Drive Different Experiences With Pain and Opioids

Given health disparities and social inequalities, including women’s greater likelihood of experiencing chronic pain, policymakers must consider how their responses to the opioid crisis may affect groups differently.

Health

Thinking About Becoming Pregnant? Get a Flu Shot

Flu vaccination during pregnancy provides critical health benefits in utero. Yet only about half of pregnant women get the shot, with even lower rates among black women.

Health, Human Rights, Development & Security

Once Again, the Global Gag Rule Increases Maternal Deaths

Keeping U.S. aid from organizations that provide abortion-related services is devastating to vulnerable women, girls, and LGBTQI communities in the global south.

Health, Human Rights, Development & Security, Immigration & Refugees

Nielsen’s departure won’t heal the traumas of child separations

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen oversaw the implementation of controversial U.S. child separation policies at the U.S.-Mexican border, and she stepped down when the Trump Administration asked her to violate a court order against the practice to resume such family separations.

Criminal Legal System, Health, Labor, Family & Economic Security, Reproductive Health

Shaming and Blaming Mothers Under the Law

The perfect mother is a ubiquitous, if impossible, part of American life. We see her in spandex at the gym, working out—self-care!—a week after delivering twins. She’s at center-stage when internet experts opine about how mothers can prevent teenagers’ opioid addictions. In the shadow of this unattainable, idealized vision of a mother as a virtual guarantor of their children’s health and happiness, actual mothers berate themselves for falling short of perfection, feeling ashamed and inadequate. In the American legal system, the pervasive stereotype of the perfect mother can lead to serious consequences, dramatically distorting the judgments of police, prosecutors, judges, and jurors.

Health, Reproductive Health

Variation in Title X Leads to Contraception Deserts

Title X of the Public Health Service Act is the only federal program devoted exclusively to family planning and reproductive health care. Title X is symbolic of the mid-20th century’s widespread and bipartisan support for policies aimed at increasing access to affordable contraception. More recently, the once-separate politics of abortion and contraception have converged. Just as we see a growing number of “abortion-free zones,” we are witnessing the growth of contraception deserts, or geographic areas with inequitable access to affordable family planning due to states’ broad discretion in Title X implementation. New and proposed reforms to Title X at the state and federal levels may expand contraception deserts. This inequality isn’t trivial. Two-thirds of reproductive age women in the U.S. use contraception, and more than 20 million women require the assistance of public programs to afford that contraception.

Health, Immigration & Refugees

Policy in Flux and Latina Lives on the Line

As the nation swings from one polarizing policy debate to another – from health care to taxes to immigration – the connections among these issues can get lost in the rhetoric. The common impacts of those three particular issues are, however, nowhere more visible than in Latina health care access and outcomes. We’re talking about millions of Americans: children, the elderly, low and middle income, citizen and noncitizen alike. Latinas, a sizeable demographic within each of these populations, are especially vulnerable because of the ways in which ethnicity, gender, income, documentation status, and age intersect. Latinas’ lives and livelihoods are on the line.

Health

Crucial Coverage: Access to Women’s Health Care

In the world’s richest country, maternal mortality rates are rising steadily. A 2016 study revealed a drastic increase in U.S. deaths during childbirth from 2000 to 2014, while worldwide rates were dropping. Advanced industrialized countries overall have an average maternal mortality rate of 12 deaths per 100,000 live births, while the U.S. has a rate of 19.9. Measuring up to 42 days after birth, the current rate for the U.K. is 8.9 deaths per 100,000 live births. There are a number of factors that play into maternal death rates, but given that the vast majority of pregnancy-related deaths are preventable, it is reasonable to conclude that greater availability of medical care could reduce this elevated death rate (and, conversely, a contraction of such care may well lead to higher mortality). This conclusion is borne out in a comparison of two states, Texas and California. Beyond their differences in the expansion of insurance to low-income residents, these states also differed in their attention to maternal medical care.

Zobeida Bonilla

University of Minnesota, School of Public Health, Division of Epidemiology and Community Health

Debra DeBruin

University of Minnesota, Center for Bioethics, Medicine, and Philosophy

Liz Boyle

University of Minnesota, Sociology & Law

Health

We Need Women’s Leadership More Than Ever During COVID-19

Many Will Die From This Pandemic—Some From Domestic Violence

Domestic Violence Is Also a Virus

Changing the Odds for Black Mothers

Gender and the “War” on COVID-19

Gender, Masculinity, and COVID-19

Eviscerating Access to Abortion Care Under Roe v. Wade

Inequities Drive Different Experiences With Pain and Opioids

Thinking About Becoming Pregnant? Get a Flu Shot

Once Again, the Global Gag Rule Increases Maternal Deaths

Nielsen’s departure won’t heal the traumas of child separations

Shaming and Blaming Mothers Under the Law

Variation in Title X Leads to Contraception Deserts

Policy in Flux and Latina Lives on the Line

Crucial Coverage: Access to Women’s Health Care