Women & health
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Historical Article
Calling Jane: the life and death of a women's illegal abortion service.
In May, 1972, seven Chicago women were arrested and charged with performing illegal abortions. Over the course of the preceding five years, the members of Jane, as this illegal abortion collective was denoted, had arranged, assisted and performed nearly 15,000 illegal abortions. The very fact that Jane existed as long as it did and assisted as many women as it did, was evidence of the central role that abortion and other reproductive decisions play in women's daily lives. ⋯ This action was, in effect, a continuation of the centuries old women's health network. Records of the Chicago Women's Liberation Union, words and deeds of the city's feminists and interviews with members of Jane, permit a consideration of important medical, philosophical and historical issues that surround the turbulent issue of abortion. In this setting the boundaries between and definitions of lay and medical practitioners become indistinct, the differences between women-centered and physician-centered medical care become more obvious, and at the very least Jane provides evidence of a model system by which women a generation ago successfully confronted restrictive abortion practices.
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Female sexual partners of injection drug users are at risk for AIDS because of their association with street drug cultures and all their concomitant risks, including their own non-injecting drug use. This study examines a model of the social determinants of HIV-associated sexual risk behaviors. ⋯ The findings show that crack cocaine use is the strongest contributor to the model, which explains fourteen percent of the variance of sexual risk behavior. The findings suggest that the risks associated with sexual practices are much greater for crack cocaine users than among non users of crack.
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The establishment of "fake abortion clinics" poses a great threat to women's ability to make free and informed procreative decisions. Such clinics intentionally deceive pregnant women into believing that they provide a full range of women's health services when, in reality, they provide only a pregnancy test, accompanied by intense anti-abortion propaganda. Because fake abortion clinics threaten women's interests in "privacy" and decisional autonomy, state attorneys general should challenge them under deceptive business practice statutes. Successful challenges can be brought without violating anti-abortion groups' First Amendment rights.