Women's Views on News

Mums-to-be turned away from cash-strapped hospitals

A woman in labour, who was turned away from a UK hospital, started to haemorrhage in the hospital car park.

Two off-duty nurses came to the aid of Saira Choudhri who gave birth two hours later. The incident took place at The Queen's Hospital, Romford, run by the Barking, Havering and Redbridge NHS Trust. The trust has previously been criticised for keeping wards closed to save money.

Saira says she had been told to go home by midwives even though her contractions were two minutes apart reports the Evening Standard.

In another case, a woman expecting twins was turned away from a hospital in North Staffordshire because there weren't enough beds, and she had to give birth 70 miles away from home. See The Sentinel for full story.

Remains of a Tokyo woman were found in her son's backpack.

Following the discovery last week that many of Japan's centenarians were missing, officials started a nationwide search which has turned up a rather grisly finding - the remains of a Tokyo woman stuffed into her son's backpack.

The find comes weeks after the discovery of a more than 30-year-old mummified corpse of a man who had been thought to be celebrating his 111th birthday, which had sparked concern about the very old in Japan. 

Officials have fanned out nationwide since then to check on the whereabouts of citizens registered to be over 100, amid concern that relatives are failing to report their deaths in order to draw their pensions. 

In the latest find, made by police on Thursday in a Tokyo apartment, the dead woman's 64-year-old son told officials that his mother had died nine years previously, but that he hadn't been able to afford a funeral. Instead he washed her body, broke up the bones and put them in a backpack. 

Read the full story on Yahoo! News. 

Thanks to Cecilia Shandeva for this story. 

No place like home for some new mums

After X-Factor judge Danni Minogue unwittingly started a debate about home births, journalist Sali Hughes has jumped to defend women who believe there is no place like home.

Some of the right-wing press questioned the practice of home births after Danni was transferred from home to hospital mid-labour (and see WVoN story about article by doctors warning that women who have home births put their babies at risk).

Sali writing in The Guardian says: "It's only when you describe the safety procedures of planned home births that you realise the most common objection in fact relates to cost. "NHS money should be spent on the essentials, not lefty luxuries like home birth," said someone (a man) on Twitter last week."

At the end of the day, it is a question of choice, and allowing women to make informed choices. For some hospital is the preferred option, for others home - both should be funded and supported, and no-one should be judged.

Fewer girls undergoing FGM in Ethiopia

In the northeastern Ethiopian region of Afar, more than 91 percent of women undergo one of the most severe forms of genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C). In this region, the cut involves infibulation, the removal of the external genitalia, before sealing and leaving a small opening for menstrual blood.

However, reproductive health care education is starting to pay off and the number of girls affected is reducing, albeit gradually. 

CARE Ethiopia is working with former traditional circumcisers to improve awareness of FGM-related effects. The women are trained in reproductive health education and equipped with skills to run alternative small businesses.

Basu Mohammed, a former traditional circumciser, said: “I used to take money after circumcision. I have now received training on how to be a professional birth attendant."

“They told me it is bad for women’s health,” Mohammed, who had circumcised girls for 22 years before quitting in 2007, told IRIN. “At first, I told them you are going against the will of Allah, I insisted [abandoning the cut] was Haram [forbidden by religion]. But after a series of discussions with religious teachers I decided to stop.”

Aside from the immediate risks of severe blood loss, shock and infection, longer-term problems associated with FGM include: infections of the urinary and reproductive tracts, infertility and a range of obstetric complications, such as postpartum haemorrhage and death of the baby.

What can I say? This is such an abhorrent practice but at least Ethiopia is making progress, however slowly, to reduce it. 

Another report says the Pill doesn't make the brain bigger

Following the story in the Daily Mail yesterday that we covered here on WVoN about the Pill making women's brains bigger, an article in NHS Choices more or less demolishes the study on which the report was based. 

It says the study was too small (it involved 14 men and 28 women) to conclude anything very much and certainly not that the Pill affects "the volume of grey matter in the brain". 

It points out that there is "no way of knowing what other factors, including genetic factors, may have had on these participants' brains as no other data was taken. Also, since it did not actually examine or measure cognitive performance, it cannot shed any light on how the Pill might affect cognitive or social skills". 

I guess there is one small pleasure to glean from this, in that the Daily Mail used the story to try to reinforce the rather tired stereotype that women talk a lot because the study allegedly enhanced the brain's "conversation hub". Now that is worth talking about. 

Health rights or abortion rights? Obama's choice

US pro-choice organisations are criticising President Obama for the implications of the new health reforms for abortion access, reports WomensEnews.

The Obama administration's stringent ban on abortion coverage in the new high-risk pools for people with pre-existing conditions who have been denied coverage in the individual market has spurred criticism among pro-choice organizations.

They say the ban harms the vulnerable women that the historic health care reform legislation was supposed to protect.

"This ban is blatantly unfair to the thousands of women who have heart disease, diabetes and other serious health conditions and who have been unable to afford and obtain the health care they need," said Donna Crane, policy director of NARAL Pro-Choice America. "Without access to abortion, these women will suffer lifelong complications for their health."

Misogyny in Tanzania in the name of reducing HIV

AllAfrica report on a growing number of Tanzanian women who are reported as being 'caught in the crossfire' of community attempts to reduce growing HIV rates. A number of women have been attacked and abused by groups of men claiming that their 'inappropriate dress' is increasing the risk of HIV spreading. Moreover, local reports suggest that these attacks are in some cases being encouraged by community elders.

Josiah Makulu, 67, a community elder in Mkinga, believes returning to ancient cultural values is the best way to reduce the spread of HIV/AIDS. He and several other elders have been encouraging locals to punish "inappropriately" dressed women.

"Why are they giving out condoms when we can go back to our culture?" he asked. "If women start dressing decently no man will have to look at them and people will only have their wives. The way they are dressing today ... they are leading young men astray."

Sheik Omar Abdallah, another elder, also blames women's choice of clothing for putting local communities at risk. "If you find a man sleeping with many women, it is because those women have attracted him in one way," he said.

Community workers have condemned the recent attacks. "Communities believe in upholding moral values but while having morals is good, people have rights and when you punish them for wearing certain clothes... you defeat your cause," Godwin Msumba, a community health worker, said.

America's next top model has 'shockingly thin' waist

American model Tyra Banks has apologised for eulogising on reality show "America's Next Top Model" about a 6-feet 2-inch contestant with a shockingly small waist.

Banks has now said that she is truly sorry for the way in which the clip was presented. She wrote on Tyra.com that: "Like all of my projects, I am extremely involved in ‘America's Next Top Model' from casting the final contestants to conceptualizing the episode challenges, but with all the work and details that go into producing a TV show, I can't be 100 places at once (although I try)'.

Banks explained that she offered support and encouragement to Ann, the aspiring model in the promo, who was "experiencing her own internal struggles with her body, and the cruelty she faces on a daily basis directly related to the way she looks."

Read the full story in the New York Daily News.

Mothers under 20 are three times more likely to suffer the unexpected death of their baby

Even though sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS, also known as cot deaths) have fallen since 2004, the Guardian reports that young mothers under the age of 20 are three times more likely to suffer the unexpected death of their baby than those who are older.

There were 281 cot deaths in England and Wales in 2008, according to the Office for National Statistics, but the Foundation for the Study of Infant Deaths (FISD) said that there were 312 deaths if those elsewhere in the UK were also counted. 

The rate, at 0.4  per 1,000 live births has not risen since the previous year. Advice to parents, primarily urging them to put a baby to sleep on its back rather than front and not to smoke nearby, is believed to have resulted in a 20% fall in cot deaths since 2004.

But the higher death rate among babies born to young mothers may suggest the advice is not getting through to them, according to the Foundation.

"The figures show that deaths in the UK have remained static and the rate for the young mothers is still unacceptably high," said its director, Joyce Epstein.

Taking the Pill makes your brain bigger

According to the Daily Mail, a study has found that taking the Pill makes certain areas of women's brains bigger by as much as 3%. 

In an apparent attempt at humour, the paper then says: "In a further discovery that will give women plenty to talk about, the research showed the contraceptive enhances the brain's 'conversation hub'". Ho, ho, ho, I'm laughing so much I'm splitting my sides - of course, that's only when I'm not talking. 

Anyway, to carry on - it seems that scientists took high-resolution images of the brains of 14 men and of 28 women, half of whom were on the Pill. The women not on it were scanned more than once to account for the hormonal fluctuations that occur over the course of a month.

Several areas of the brains of women taking the Pill were found to be larger than the brains of those not taking the contraceptive, the journal Brain Research reports.

No matter which brand or formulation of the drug, or how long it had been prescribed for, the results were the same.

The growth occurred in regions that scans showed to already be larger in women compared to men, like those involved in conversation. 

However, the contraceptive appeared to have little effect on areas more dominant in men, including those associated with spatial skills such as map reading.

The way this story has been reported is just so typical Daily Mail. They cannot resist taking a stereotyped swipe at women. Because if you read down the story to what the author of the report actually said, you'll find she referred to an increase in "memory and verbal skills". Ho, hum.