Word: menstrual
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...MORE THAN A decade ago, the South Carolina medical researcher came up with a theory explaining why young women rarely have heart attacks. It isn't that they are protected by the hormone estrogen, as conventional wisdom had it, said Sullivan, but that they lose iron every month during menstrual bleeding. And iron, he believed, promotes heart attacks. Now a study from Finland, published in the American Heart Association journal Circulation, has provided strong evidence that he was right...
...have to provide an abortion underground, with networks to help women get to states where abortion is available. Some are urging more radical solutions. Carol Downer, director of the Federation of Feminist Women's Health Centers, based in Los Angeles, travels widely to talk to women's groups about "menstrual extraction," a home-abortion procedure she co-developed in the early 1970s. A suction technique similar to the vacuum-aspiration process that is now the most common form of first-trimester abortion, it requires a 50-mL syringe attached to a flexible plastic tube, which withdraws the contents...
...premise behind menstrual extraction is that a home abortion provided by concerned friends is better than one carried out in some surgical speakeasy. Downer insists that women without medical training can learn to perform menstrual extraction on other women safely. A cooperative doctor may still be needed to obtain the equipment, some of which can be purchased legally only by physicians or clinics. "It will take some thinking and determination and motivation to put ((the kit)) together," she says...
Many doctors and abortion-rights groups consider her message irresponsible and menstrual extraction far too risky to contemplate. They stress the danger of infection, sterility or even deadly sepsis in the event of a puncture in the uterus. If menstrual extraction is attempted more than six weeks after a woman's last period, it can also lead to severe complications, including cramps, bleeding and blood clots...
...long as women can get to any state where abortion is legal, menstrual extraction is unlikely to become a real alternative to physician-provided abortions. But the very fact that it's under discussion once more is a sign of the ways in which America is bracing itself for a partial return to the past. In the two decades since Roe was handed down, a generation has grown up that knows nothing of the days of illicit abortions conducted on kitchen tables, or in doctor's offices at night with the blinds drawn...