Partner Abuse and Unwanted Pregnancies: It’s Time to Talk

Through my work at Planned Parenthood and in community health nursing, I have heard more than my share of terrible stories about abused women becoming pregnant.  By their own accounts, many, many young, pregnant women have told me similar stories of partner abuse: a pressure to get pregnant.

For health care professionals in the community setting, this is not an unusual story.  These women’s stories are now being corroborated by a report to be released today by the federally funded National Domestic Violence Hotline.  The group found that 1 in 4 women, of the 3,000 women questioned who had called the hotline, reported being pressured or forced into having unprotected sex.

The horror doesn’t end there.  According to an article in the New York Times, the director of health at the Family Violence Prevention Fund, Lisa James, recounted stories discovered by the study.  This included men refusing to wear condoms or flushing their partner’s birth control pills down the toilet.  Many women also reported being forced to conceal taking their own birth control pills.

All of this comes on the coattails of the highly controversial new bill about to be considered by South Dakota’s GOP-dominated House of Representatives regarding “justifiable homicide” of abortion providers based on “resisting an attempt to harm an unborn child”.  South Dakota’s proposed bill, in a state where it is almost impossible for a woman to safely terminate a pregnancy, is just one of the many new assaults on a woman’s right to choose featured in the news recently.

We cannot discount the link between interpersonal violence and unwanted pregnancy.  Proposed new legislation, such as that in South Dakota, seeks to conceivably protect an abuser attempting to keep his partner pregnant.  According to the New York Times, Ms. James, of the Family Violence Prevention Fund, believes not enough people are asking questions about interpersonal violence and abuse of women with unwanted pregnancies.  Is it just because we don’t want to hear their answers?

Through my work at Planned Parenthood and

Social Media Week: Health Tech Food

“Social Media Week (SMW) is a global platform that connects people, content, and conversation around emerging trends in social and mobile media. February 7-11 is the  fourth social media week conference since it’s inception. It is being held in multi cities, is free, and supported by global and local sponsors.  This year it’s focus was on how societies, cultures and economies around the world are becoming more integrated and more empowered through a global network of communication.

I attended a session titled, Health Tech Food , sponsored by Luminary Labs at the  The Paley Center for Media, one of the five sites, which they referred to as Content Hubs, where events are taking place in New York City. There were four short presentations by terrific speakers that set us up to get to work in our ideation workshops: open source health, food systems, the quantified self or mobile health. This excellent use of the talent attending this event made it one of the most thought-provoking learning sessions I’ve attended in a long time. Kudos to the design team. You can see five of the winning ideation teams ideas presented and captured by my Flip Camera work on CHMP’s YouTube Channel here.

Barbara Glickstein is the Co-director of the Center for Health, Media and Policy.

 

 

"Social Media Week (SMW) is a global platform that