The Nature of Things

The Guardian's headline was appalling, but not really surprising to anyone who has been alive and paying attention in Texas for the past few years: Texas has highest maternal mortality rate in developed world, study finds The story that followed gave the shocking facts. A report in the September issue of the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology  gives details of a study by researchers from the University of Maryland, Boston University's school of public health, and Stanford university's medical school. The study found that the rate of Texas women who died from complications related to pregnancy doubled from 2010 to 2014 to 35.8 deaths per 100,000 births in 2014. This represents a maternal mortality rate higher than any other state and higher than any other country in the developed world.  Yes, we're number one - in women's deaths from the complications of pregnancy. The report stated that the doubling of mortality rates in the study period was hard to explain "i...

The website iVillage has been compiling data about the condition of women's lives in the United States here in the second decade of the 21st century. They researched such sources as the 2010 U.S.Census, the National Women's Law Center, National Partnership for Women and Families, and the National Network to End Domestic Violence. What they found makes for appalling reading. They ranked the fifty states according to their protection of women and families and of women's rights. The assault on women's rights is a nationwide policy objective of the right-wing to "put women in their place," and there are few bright spots in the data that they found, but five states were particularly bad. According to iVillage, these five are the very worst of the worst:      5. Kentucky  Over 77% of the women  in the state  live in a county without an abortion provider and nearly 20% of the women live in poverty. Not even a quarter of the women in the state have a college degre...

The rule promulgated by the Obama administration regarding the coverage of contraceptives by insurance companies continues to make news. But most of the news that it makes has been about the shouting of the Catholic bishops over what they think is their right to impose their religious beliefs on everybody regardless of the individual's religious or non-religious beliefs. Much less attention has been paid to the rights of women to control their own bodies and their own sexuality and their right to use contraceptives should they choose to do so. The Republicans and their overlords at Fox News have gone to great pains to obscure and fail to report the simple fact that the right to contraceptives is overwhelmingly popular in this country. Instead, they obsess about the poor downtrodden bishops being forced to provide contraceptives and pay for the coverage. Which, of course, they aren't. Under the rule, the coverage has to be offered and paid for by the insurance company. Meanwhil...

The war against women's rights in America has taken a nasty turn in the past year, especially since the election of 2010 when the Republicans made such inroads into state governments as well as the House of Representatives. They took that as a mandate, as confirmation that the nation was behind them in their attempts to put women in their place, which in their worldview is at home, homeschooling the children. The strong-arm tactics of these people who bill themselves as "small government conservatives" and their attempts to insert themselves between women and their doctors has been an especially troubling aspect of this war. They have attempted - and succeeded in all too many instances - to roll back access to women's preventive health care in virtually every state where Republicans now hold power in the government. From access to abortion to access to contraceptives, they have made it their business to stick their long noses into women's business everywhere. Even...

Our new Republican Congress keeps telling us that their number one priority is jobs, but their every action gives the lie to that claim. First, it was revisiting the Affordable Health Care Law. Now they are pursuing their true first priority - seeking to reverse every gain towards equality that women have made in the last hundred years. While Republicans say all the right things, offering empty platitudes about women's equality, their agenda is to legislate women into second-class citizenship. This is true not only at the national level but in state legislatures all across the country. Republicans are seeking to reverse, through legislative action, the protections of the Equal Pay Act. They insist that the law is no longer needed because the pay gap has all but been eradicated. This is blatantly false, but when were these bozos ever guided by facts? The big guns of this Republican war against women, though, are trained at women's health issues, specifically reproductive i...

So, after forty years of reporting about women, Ellen Goodman is retiring. I guess she's earned a rest. It has been an eventful forty years. Ellen Goodman and I are contemporaries and I have spent much of those last forty years reading her columns and nodding my heading in agreement. Sometimes I also shed a tear or crumpled the paper in frustration, because a lot of what she had to report on was not progress. It was the story of the continued demeaning of women and women's concerns, "women's issues" - i.e., life, death, the bringing up of children, the dignity of work and the desire for equal treatment in the workplace, health care and the desire for equal treatment in that arena, as well. The list could go on and on, and it has, but it is a list that is too often overlooked by the mainstream media. We are lucky that we had Ellen Goodman there to kick them in the shins and sometimes in the seat of their pants and say, "Hey, fathead, you are overlooking ...