For years, hormone therapy (HT)— either estrogen alone or combined with progestin—was seen as the panacea for pesky menopausal symptoms and possibly as a shield against diseases that often strike menopausal women. The tide turned when the initial findings of the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI), linking combined HT with a slightly increased risk of heart attacks, strokes, and breast cancer, were released in 2002. The results and the media frenzy that followed sent many menopausal women to their doctors in a panic over whether they should quit HT right away.

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What makes us the way we are? Why are some people predisposed to be anxious, overweight or asthmatic? How is it that some of us are prone to heart attacks, diabetes or high blood pressure?

There’s a list of conventional answers to these questions. We are the way we are because it’s in our genes: the DNA we inherited at conception. We turn out the way we do because of our childhood experiences: how we were treated and what we took in, especially during those crucial first three years. Or our health and well-being stem from the lifestyle choices we make as adults: what kind of diet we consume, how much exercise we get.

Read the entire article here.

Millions of women experience vaginal discomfort, and sometimes crippling pain, for a variety of reasons, most often a loss of estrogen. The resulting vaginal dryness and atrophy can make sexual intercourse, a pelvic exam, urinating, or even sitting, walking or cycling a painful nightmare.

In addition to women near or pastmenopause, those affected include women who have recently given birth or arebreast-feeding, women treated with estrogen-suppressing drugs for breast cancer or given chemotherapy or pelvic radiation for other cancers, and women whose ovaries were surgically removed.

Read the rest of the article here.

Starting Wednesday, millions of American women will no longer pay for birth control pills, Pap smears or mammograms – not even a co-pay. Women also have the right to free breast-feeding support, supplies for pregnancy-related diabetes, also known as gestational diabetes, and even screening for domestic violence.

It’s not clear how many women will take advantage of the new policy, but the US Health and Human Services Department estimates that 47 million women, ages 15 to 64, have private health insurance plans that will be affected. The 2010 health reform law requires that policies provided by private health insurance companies pay for a list of women’s health preventive services, starting August 1.

Read the entire article here.

Here are a few really interesting articles about what’s going on with reproductive rights in this country:

Challenges to Obama Administration’s birth control mandate piling up in court

Challenges to President Obama’s birth-control mandate are piling up in court.

Twenty-four lawsuits have been filed against the federal birth-control mandate so far, mostly from religious groups that view the policy as a dangerous erosion of religious freedom.

Universal access to contraception could be a life saver

Last week a Lancet study estimated that providing contraception to women in developing countries could reduce maternal deaths by nearly a third. Following this, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation pledged $560 million to provide family planning services to millions of women from the poorest countries.

This is exciting from a global perspective, but we must not lose sight of just how critical contraception is to the health and well-being of women and families right here in the US, including the women of Nevada, where I am an ob-gyn.

KANSAS CITY, Missouri (Reuters) – Missouri’s Democratic Governor Jay Nixon on Thursday vetoed a bill that could have resulted in women being denied insurance coverage for contraception, in the latest battle over Catholic Church objections to providing birth control coverage as part of the new health care law.

Republican lawmakers in Missouri drafted the law in response to President Barack Obama’s policy of requiring insurers to cover birth control for free as part of the new federal health care law, even if they work for a church or other employer who has a moral objection.

Read the entire article here.

Articles featured in this month’s issue include:

Keeping the Love Alive

Bone Up on Bone Health

Staying Sharp: The Aging Mind

And more. You can find this issue of Pause here.

Women’s reproductive rights were hard-won decades ago, and while there have been encroachments and threats to them over the years, they have generally been supported by the law. And women have availed themselves of those rights in large numbers.

Since the choice to terminate an unwanted pregnancy was established by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973 in Roe v. Wade, almost one in three women have had abortions. The legality of contraception was established even earlier, in 1965, in Griswold v. Connecticut, and tens of millions of women use some form of artificial contraception.

Read the rest of the article here.