Tonight in women’s health (and personal freedoms): reproductive sewer surveillance, the Project 2275 playbook, more depth on the birth control backlash, maternal mortality in conflict zones, and the slow-growing OBGYN workforce.
AUTOPSY FOR 13 WEEK MISCARRIAGE IN SC? // A bizarre and frightening story from South Carolina, where an employee at a county sewer facility found a 13–15-week-old fetus and alerted law enforcement. The fetus was clearly the product of a miscarriage (which often happens in a toilet), but the county still performed an autopsy. They found no evidence of trauma, but they are still looking to establish a DNA profile to find the mother (??!!)
BIG BROTHER WANTS WOMEN OUT OF COLLEGE // Jill Filipovic reports that the authors of “Project 2025” have a new playbook for America’s next 250 years, and it lays out a shockingly (but not shockingly?) explicit plan to roll back women’s rights. That includes banning IVF, restricting contraception, and having fewer women go to college so they can marry early and have children. If you think this is an exaggeration, Filipovic goes point-by-point through the document, using its own text.
THE WHOLE BIRTH CONTROL BACKLASH BUSINESS // Hannah Seo has a deep dive on Vox exploring how frustrations with hormonal contraception are in part fueling a backlash—and that includes how real medical gaps are driving some people to junk science. As she puts it: “…it’s worth interrogating where people’s dissatisfactions come from, and tracing how legitimate experiences with and worries about hormonal contraceptives can lead people toward alternate (and often scientifically dubious) sources of education about their bodies.”
WAR IS DEADLY FOR MOMS // A World Health Organization report found nearly two-thirds of all women who die in childbirth live in countries wracked by conflict or instability. In other words, unstable political environments make pregnancy far deadlier than it should be. They also find some potential solutions: “In Colombia, training traditional birth attendants shows how strengthening trusted local networks can ensure timely care even where access is limited due to geography, insecurity or mistrust.”
OBGYNS MISSING AFTER MED SCHOOL // Researchers found OBGYN residency programs grew more slowly than most other specialties over the past 20 years, even after a 2015 change was supposed to help disparities among medical specialties. Since 2016, the specialty has lagged behind family medicine, emergency medicine, internal medicine, and psychiatry. They say it is leading to a “persistent gap in capacity to meet increasing demand.”