While I was gone, I wasn't posting, but I was saving up links to post. Emptying out the bookmarks:
CSM writes about a rise in pregnancy discrimination suits.
"There are things being said in 2006 that you would have been shocked by 30 years ago," she [Cynthia Calvert, deputy director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California Hastings College of Law] says. "Employers still say things like, 'You're being terminated because you need to take a lot of time off for your problem pregnancy and for maternity leave.' One woman was told she would not be promoted because she got pregnant. We're also finding men requesting leave and being terminated." A chemical engineer won a $3 million verdict after her boss asked her, "Do you want to have babies or have a career here?"
This is an incredibly important managerial issue, if employers want to keep valuable female employees. I have friends that believe they're getting a good deal from their big law firms to work "only" 40 hours a week. We don't have paid maternity leave in America, and there's very little emphasis on work being one part of a person's life, rather than the epicenter.
In other news:
Maternal diseases and childhood diseases may lead to shorter lives, in a predictable way. NYT ran a story on how our lifespans have changed in 100 years. Also, these interesting bits:
They also found that diseases early in life left people predisposed to chronic illnesses when they grew older.
“Suppose you were a survivor of typhoid or tuberculosis,” Dr. Fogel said. “What would that do to aging?” It turned out, he said, that the number of chronic illnesses at age 50 was much higher in that group. “Something is being undermined,” he said. “Even the cancer rates were higher. Ye gods. We never would have suspected that.”
Men who had respiratory infections or measles tended to develop chronic lung disease decades later. Malaria often led to arthritis. Men who survived rheumatic fever later developed diseased heart valves.
...
In one study, he examined health records of 8,760 people born in Helsinki from 1933 to 1944. Those whose birth weight was below about six and a half pounds and who were thin for the first two years of life, with a body mass index of 17 or less, had more heart disease as adults.
Another study, of 15,000 Swedish men and women born from 1915 to 1929, found the same thing. So did a study of babies born to women who were pregnant during the Dutch famine, known as the Hunger Winter, in World War II.
My friend Steve told me about a new birth control pill he saw on TV - Yaz. It's an extended (24 day) cycle of the Yasmin pill, made by the same company.
Britian is working on fighting FGM. This is a tricky issue because, as the article states, most people aren't doing it to hurt the children. Further, Egypt found when they made it illegal, it became more dangerous, as families did not stop the practice, they just stopped going to hospitals for clean, safe, procedures. I believe the US has granted asylum to a woman who faced FGM if she was returned to her home country, but I have a lot of bookmarks, and so I'm not going to look it up right now.
Water aerobics eases back pain during pregnancy. There you go.
The EU agreed to continue funding stem cell research, even with the moral questions it raises (for some).
European Commissioner for Science and Research Janez Potocnik said the EU would not finance the "procurement" of embryonic stem cells - a process which results in the death of the embryo - but it would finance the "subsequent steps" to make use of the cells.
Also, the statute of limitations ran out for some women suing over their frozen embryos being implanted (sans permission) in other womens' uteruses.
That's all I've got for now. But I should be blogging regularly for the foreseeable future.
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