On Monday, ThinkProgress reported that a 2009 bill introduced by Virginia state Sen. Mark Obenshain (R) would have required women to report an instance of “fetal death” to the police within 24 hours if it did not occur in the presence of a doctor. The implication behind that type of measure is, of course, that law enforcement should double check to make sure that the women experienced a miscarriage rather than induced an illegal abortion. Obenshain, who is now the state’s Republican nominee for attorney general, ended up striking the proposed legislation after concerns about the undue burden it might place on women who miscarry.

But even though that bill didn’t become law back in 2009, there are still some situations in the state in which miscarriages are treated as potential crimes. In fact, the Virginian-Pilot reported on Tuesday that two women have been charged with “producing an illegal abortion” after one of them gave birth to a pre-term baby who died shortly after birth. Witnesses allege that they overhead the two women planning to buy drugs intended to end the pregnancy:

Jessica Renee Carpenter, 20, and her friend Rachael Anne Lowe, 27, each were charged with one count of producing an illegal abortion, which carries a sentence of two to 10 years. Each also was charged with one count of conspiracy to commit a felony.

According to a search warrant affidavit, Carpenter was 25 weeks pregnant — near the end of her second trimester — when she went to Bon Secours DePaul Medical Center in labor April 11. The baby died about 20 minutes after he was born.

Norfolk Child Protective Services received an anonymous call reporting that Carpenter had intended to end her pregnancy. Police interviewed three friends of both women, who said Carpenter and Lowe wanted to end Carpenter’s pregnancy and that they heard them talking about buying items from a drugstore that she could ingest to do it, according to the affidavit. [...]

Carpenter has a ninth-grade education and was unemployed, according to court records. Lowe previously worked at the Tidewater Women’s Health Clinic in Norfolk, which performs abortions for pregnant women up to 14 weeks after their last menstrual period.

Under Virginia law, second-trimester abortions must be performed in a licensed hospital facility in the presence of a physician. Obviously, it’s important to crack down on illegal abortion providers who aren’t providing women with safe care, and — unlike Obenshain’s proposed bill — that’s likely the sole intent behind the state’s current law. But, if the allegations against the two Virginia women are true, the law will have the added effect of prosecuting a woman who made the choice to terminate her own pregnancy. The Virginia-Pilot notes that the only other “illegal abortion” charge on the books was back in 2007, when a man slipped abortion-inducing drugs into his girlfriend’s drink that caused her to have a miscarriage — an act that was obviously done without the woman’s consent.

Even if Carpenter’s miscarriage was self-induced, her case brings up questions about the criminalization of elective abortion procedures across the country. The mounting pile of state-level restrictions intended to restrict women’s access to abortion mean that some desperate women can’t get the reproductive care they need without making themselves into a suspect in the eyes of the law. That’s particularly true under late-term abortion bans, an increasingly popular anti-choice tactic to narrow the window in which women may obtain a legal abortion. If abortion is criminalized at 20 or 18 or even just six weeks of pregnancy, every woman’s miscarriage after that point could be a potential piece of evidence.

And of course, if Carpenter really did take drugs to induce an illegal abortion, it’s worth considering what might have led an undereducated, unemployed, desperate woman like Carpenter to make the choice she did. Perhaps she didn’t have the money for a legal abortion earlier in her pregnancy. Maybe she was too ashamed to make an appointment at a women’s health clinic. She might not have had any support from her friends and family, and she might have felt like she didn’t have any other options.

A pill bottle that glows blue when it’s time to take another dose, and red when you’ve accidentally forgotten to take one. Pills embedded with sensors that allow doctors to track who’s swallowing them. A pill bottle that starts to grow spots, like an overripe banana, when the medicine has expired.

Insurers and pharmacies are increasingly investing in these kind of start-up ventures, hoping to develop new technologies that can help Americans stick to their medication regimens. But why is this area of innovation becoming a top priority? It’s largely because the Americans who fail to take their medication as directed contribute to billions of dollars in wasteful health care spending every year. People who skip doses, take pills that have expired, or lapse too long between refills often experience health complications that lead to unnecessary hospital and doctor visits, ultimately costing insurers an estimated $290 billion each year.

Pharmacy-benefit programs like CVS Caremark have typically relied on robo-calls and mailers to remind their patients to take their pills as directed. But the old tricks aren’t working. “After six months’ time, only half of people taking prescription medicines are taking them as directed,” said Troyen Brennan, the chief medical officer of CVS Caremark Corp., explained to the Wall Street Journal.

So they’re trying to step their efforts up a notch. CVS is pilot-testing a new technology that will allow them to better track the patients who have track records of failing to adhere to their medication schedules. And other companies are working on developing apps that will reward patients who take their pills on time with gift certificates and coupons. And they continue to evaluate a range of other innovative ideas to accomplish the same goals, like new high-tech pill bottles.

There have been other recent pushes to build a better pill bottle, too, but those have been focused on addressing a different issue with prescription drugs — the Americans who end up abusing them. In Utah, a group of college students built an electronic pill bottle that will only dispense the specific dosage that the pharmacist has prescribed, preventing their patients from taking too much of the drug or selling the pills to other people. And in New York City, the police force is currently experimenting with implanting GPS chips in pill bottles so they’ll be able to better track stolen drugs and illegal prescription stockpiles.

U.K. public health officials are racing to contain a rash of measles outbreaks among older British children that threatens to spread the highly contagious disease throughout the country. The budding epidemic has been linked to a debunked 1998 anti-vaccine study that caused U.K. vaccination rates against measles to plummet.

In 1998, a team of British scientists led by Dr. Andrew Wakefield published a widely rebuked paper that incorrectly linked the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine with autism. The study, which received widespread attention at the time, led many British parents to forgo their children’s MMR shots — something that is possible in the U.K. since schoolchildren aren’t subject to mandatory vaccination laws as they are in the United States.

The vaccine exodus led to a sharp decline in MMR immunization — from 90 percent of all children to just 54 percent in a year — and its consequences are now coming into full view, as unvaccinated British teenagers spread measles by the thousands:

This year, the U.K. has had more than 1,200 cases of measles, after a record number of nearly 2,000 cases last year. The country once recorded only several dozen cases every year. It now ranks second in Europe, behind only Romania.

The majority of those getting sick in the U.K. — including a significant number of older children and teens — had never been vaccinated. [...]

Across the U.K., about 90 percent of children under 5 are vaccinated against measles and have received the necessary two doses of the vaccine. But among children now aged 10 to 16, the vaccination rate is slightly below 50 percent in some regions.

To stop measles outbreaks, more than 95 percent of children need to be fully immunized. In some parts of the U.K., the rate is still below 80 percent.

By contrast, the U.S. — where measles immunization rates are above 90 percent — reported just 55 cases of measles last year.

Still, Americans tend not to get their vaccinations if they can help it. While U.S. school attendance is generally contingent on a variety of shots for highly contagious diseases, others such as the yearly influenza shot and HPV vaccine aren’t, leading the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to call American immunization numbers “unacceptably low.” Politicians and public officials who parrot discredited conspiracy theories similar to the Wakefield study contribute to that trend.

As the political fight over Obamacare continues, Republican legislators in highly uninsured states have turned their back on Medicaid expansion — despite the fact that expanding the public insurance program could extend coverage to millions of their constituents. Of course, even if stringently anti-Obamacare politicians refuse to cooperate with health reform, the law will still take effect. But that doesn’t necessarily mean those red states won’t feel the impact of refusing to add more residents to their Medicaid rolls.

Health care outcomes already vary widely across states. Unfortunately, health policy does too. The states that are already among the nation’s healthiest are the ones taking steps to ensure their low-income residents will have the insurance coverage they need — while the unhealthier, more highly uninsured GOP-led states are refusing to do the same. As an analysis from the Los Angeles Times points out, the health care reform law can’t change the fact that the stubborn lawmakers resisting Medicaid expansion are likely going to deepen the health disparities that already exist across the country:

With nearly every GOP-leaning state on track to reject an expansion of the government health plan for the poor, the healthcare law’s goal of guaranteed insurance will become a reality next year mostly in traditionally liberal and moderate states. These states already have higher rates of health coverage.

Residents of these states — concentrated in the Northeast, upper Midwest and West Coast — also have better access to doctors and are less likely to die from preventable illnesses.

Colon cancer deaths in states opposing Medicaid expansion, for example, are an average of 16% higher than in pro-expansion states, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis of state health data.

Deaths from breast cancer are 8% higher on average in anti-expansion states. And adults under 65 are 40% more likely on average to have lost six or more teeth from decay, infection or gum disease.

An earlier analysis found that the governors for the most unsinsured cities in the United States have been resistant to expanding Medicaid. And even after some of those governors started to come around — most notably, Florida’s Rick Scott — the Republicans in the state legislature have continued to block the initiative. Opposition persists despite the fact that the poor Americans in the South, who are already being forced to delay their medical care because they can’t afford it, stand to gain the most from Medicaid expansion.

This isn’t the only example of health disparities becoming sharply divided by region. Abortion access, another area of health policy that’s largely been left up to states’ interpretation, also varies widely from California to Mississippi to North Dakota to New York. “It shouldn’t be that simply because you live in Mississippi that you don’t have the same health care that you can get if you lived in California,” one abortion doctor who travels to practice at Mississippi’s last remaining abortion clinic recently pointed out. Nonetheless, that’s the growing reality for the entire health care sector.

The chief executive of a Miami, Florida hospital has pledged to begin addressing one of the most dysfunctional aspects of the American health care system, according to MedCity News. He’s striving for greater price transparency — giving patients and doctors the ability to easily see, before purchase, just what hospitals charge Medicare and other insurers for a given procedure.

A recent report gave over half the states in the U.S. a grade of “F” when it comes to price transparency. And after the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services recently provided a huge data dump on what hospitals charge government health care programs for common procedures, they found a staggering amount of variation across the country with no discernible justifications on economic or quality-of-care grounds. But the prices charged to private insurers still remain secret.

So in the wake of mounting pressure following the government’s data release, Steve Sonenreich — the chief executive of Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach — promised on a radio show on Monday that his hospital will reveal the contractual rates that it charges private insurers:

“We will post our prices relative to Blue Cross, and Aetna, our contractual prices, and we’ll challenge Baptist and the other systems in the community to do the same,” said Sonenreich, who made his pledge during a studio interview on WLRN 91.3-FM with host Tom Hudson.

Also in the radio studio was Brian Keeley, chief executive of Baptist Health South Florida, which manages seven hospitals in the region. Keeley declined to accept Sonenreich’s challenge for price transparency, but acknowledged “That’s where the whole industry is going, undoubtedly.”

It remains to be seen whether other hospitals will follow Sonenreich’s lead. But the inability of consumers, doctors, and even many insurers themselves to compare different rates and charges openly is one of the key factors hamstringing the American health care market. With greater price transparency, it’s possible health care could begin behaving a bit more like markets are traditionally supposed to behave, and drive down prices through open competition.

Over ten percent of all doctors and nurses on the government’s Medicare and Medicaid blacklist end up on it because they defaulted on government-backed student loans. Medical workers on the blacklist are barred from treating Medicare and Medicaid patients or receiving federal reimbursements for a predesignated time period.

According to a Modern Healthcare analysis of federal records, more than 5,400 of the 51,729 people on the government health entitlement blacklist were placed on it after failing to pay an HHS-backed medical student loan. Given a still-shaky economy, some in the health care sector expect that trend to continue:

[Government data] show that one of the most common reasons for getting barred is failure to repay HHS-backed student loans: 5,417 people are currently kicked out of Medicare for that.

The number of annual exclusions related to student loans has grown steadily in the past decade, peaking at 517 in 2011 before declining again. “That is tied to the economy, and I would expect that to continue to rise,” [said Lynn Gordon, a Chicago-area hospital group partner].

The increasing frequency of default-related blacklisting could prove problematic as the Obama Administration tries to entice more medical students to become primary care and family doctors. Primary care providers and nurse practitioners will be crucial to effective Obamacare implementation, since the health law is expected to drive up demand for medical services as millions of previously uninsured Americans gain coverage.

But the ballooning cost of a medical education could end up being a major barrier to the Administration’s recruitment efforts. According to the Association of American Medical Colleges’ (AAMC) 2012 report on medical school debt, “86 percent of medical school graduates had education debt, with a median amount of $162,000″ in 2011 — a number that has been rising steadily over the years:

AAMC estimates that a borrower with the median $162,000 debt “would have monthly payments ranging from $1,500 to $2,100 after residency.”

That disproportionately affects the very primary care doctors that are integral to health care reform and the U.S. medical system at large. In a 2012 report, consulting firm Merritt Hawkins & Associates found that family practitioners, pediatricians, and psychiatrists are the lowest-paid physician groups in the U.S. with a base pay of $189,000.

While that’s still a lavish salary compared to average U.S. compensation, it pales in comparison to specialist pay — and as the entitlement blacklist numbers underscore, that contributes to a system in which care providers are banned from treating certain patients for purely financial, rather than medical or criminal, reasons.

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Mental health issues affect approximately 20 percent of the kids in the United States, according to a first-of-its-kind report from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The CDC, which partnered with several other federal agencies to study data on childhood mental illness between 2005 and 2011, say they expect that rate to increase even further in the coming years.

The mental health issues that affect children include attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism, mood and anxiety disorders, behavioral disorders, substance abuse, and Tourette Syndrome. The CDC found that ADHD was the most commonly reported mental disorder, affecting about 4.2 million children between the ages of 3 and 17. About 1.2 million children in that age group are battling depression, and about 678,000 fall somewhere on the autism spectrum. And an estimated 40 percent of children who have been diagnosed with a disorder actually suffer from multiple different mental health issues.

The CDC estimates that treating those mental health issues costs the U.S. about $247 billion each year. But that actually represents just a fraction of what the nation should be spending, since less than a quarter of the children living with mental disorders are receiving the treatment they need:

Although the prevalence, early onset and effect on society make childhood mental problems a major public health issue, only 21 percent of affected children get treatment because of a shortage of pediatric sub-specialists and child and adolescent psychiatrists, according to the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.

“Our current health care system does not meet the needs of these children,” Martin J. Drell, the group’s president, said last week in a statement about the problem.

Making matters worse, fewer medical students are opting for careers in children’s mental health, while the current crop of professionals is aging out of the workforce. The dearth of providers means troubled youngsters in underserved rural and urban areas are less likely to get timely care.

“Children with serious medical conditions should not have where they live determine what kind of health care services they receive,” said Thomas K. McInerny, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Researchers say their new report represents the first comprehensive look at mental health issues among children. “This report is a reflection of what’s happening in the nation as a whole,” one of the report’s authors, Dr. Ruth Perou, told the Daily Beast. “We’re finally opening a dialogue on mental health.”

After a series of recent mass shootings, there has been renewed interest in these kind of national discussions regarding mental health issues. Indeed, the U.S. has a long way to go in this area. Half of mentally ill Americans are currently skipping out on treatment because they can’t afford it, partly because mental health care providers don’t always accept private insurance. This problem was exacerbated by the recent economic downturn, which led many states to slash billions of dollars in funding from their mental health programs. Predictably, as those mental health services have disappeared, the prison population has skyrocketed. A recent survey of Texas’ juvenile detention facilities found that the rate of mental illness exceeds the rate of gang membership among teen prisoners there.

Fortunately, there has been some legislative movement in this area. At the beginning of this year, Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) held a series of hearings on the dire state of youth’s mental health services, and introduced a measure to strengthen school’s resources for identifying and treating kids’ mental disorders.

Not content with attempting to impose his anti-abortion agenda upon the women who live in the nation’s capital, Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) now intends to push for a nationwide bill to criminalize abortions after 20 weeks. Franks, who invoked the illegal abortion provider Kermit Gosnell to justify his decision to re-introduce a 20-week abortion ban in DC, now says that Gosnell’s crimes have compelled him to amend his bill so it applies to women across the country.

The Arizona congressmember announced his decision to expand his bill on Friday. In a statement, Franks compared Gosnell — who has been convicted of killing of three infants that were born alive following botched illegal, unsanitary abortion procedures — to all late-term abortion procedures. “Had Kermit Gosnell dismembered these babies before they had traveled down the birth canal only moments earlier, he would have, in many places nationwide, been performing an entirely legal procedure,” Franks said.

However, that’s a gross mischaracterization of the state of legal abortion services throughout the country. Abortion opponents have repeatedly attempted to twist the facts surrounding Gosnell’s high-profile murder trial to make it appear as if his crimes are rampant throughout legal abortion clinics. But that’s simply not the case. The Philadelphia-area abortion doctor was guilty of much more than simply breaking Pennsylvania’s law that criminalizes abortion after 24 weeks of pregnancy; he was also able to offer discounted prices for his services because he didn’t employ medical professionals or adhere to safety standards. Gosnell’s “house of horrors” isn’t analogous to the way that legal, sanitary late-term abortion clinics provide care to the women who need it.

Furthermore, it’s misleading to pretend that Franks’ quest to cut off legal abortion care at just 20 weeks represents a push to ban late-term abortions. In fact, 20-week abortion bans are a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade‘s guarantee of legal abortion rights until the point of viability, which is generally accepted to occur around 24 weeks of pregnancy. That’s why, after a handful of states recently enacted 20-week bans, several of them landed in court.

DC Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D) has fought against Franks’ 20-week abortion ban every time he’s proposed it. She maintains that imposing abortion bans on the District of Columbia is a “stealth way” for abortion opponents to discreetly challenge Roe, since DC doesn’t have any representation in Congress. Now that the bill will apply to the rest of the nation, she remains committed to working to defeat it. “With the help of women nationwide, we defeated the D.C. abortion ban bill on the House floor last Congress. Now that the Franks bill will expressly target all U.S. women, we can expect an even stronger national response to this attack on women’s health,” Holmes Norton said in a statement.

Ironically, pushing to restrict women’s access to abortion isn’t actually an effective policy solution to prevent future Kermit Gosnells. If Franks and his anti-choice colleagues wanted to ensure that desperate women in other states don’t have to resort to illegal providers like Gosnell, they should actually be working to make abortion services more affordable and accessible to low-income women.

One congressman is so vehemently opposed to Obamacare that he’s willing to sacrifice his own health insurance in order to make a point.

Rep. Mark Amodei (R-NV), who entered Congress in 2011, was asked last week prior to the House’s vote to repeal Obamacare whether he would be giving up his own government-sponsored health insurance. “Happy to,” Amodei replied.

QUESTIONER: Will you give up your own congressional health care after voting to repeal tomorrow?

AMODEI: Happy to. Have a nice day.

Watch it:

The Federal Employees Health Benefit Program (FEHBP), which covers all federal workers, is similar in many ways to Obamacare. For example, both provide tax-payer subsidized coverage and allow enrollees to choose private insurance plans from a highly-regulated market.

ThinkProgress reached out to Amodei’s office to see whether he has dropped his government insurance plan yet, but they have yet to respond.

Unless the Nevada congressmen is fortunate enough to attain insurance elsewhere, whether though a spouse or a private insurance plan, Amodei’s decision to give up FEHBP is financially ill advised. Giving up health insurance means he’s more likely to forgo preventive care and would have to pay large medical bills out of pocket or, if he can’t afford them, pass those bills onto taxpayers.

Still, giving up government health insurance was briefly in vogue among Tea Party Republicans on Capitol Hill. At least half a dozen GOP congressmen personally gave up government-sponsored health care in 2011 after running on a repeal-Obamacare platform.

There’s new evidence to suggest that Obamacare is impacting the health industry for the better by successfully encouraging a greater emphasis on primary care. Ensuring that Americans are receiving regular preventative care is an important tenant of the health law, since it can ultimately help lower costs by preventing people from delaying medical treatment until they’re already very sick.

For the first time ever, Americans are now spending more money on primary care physicians than they are on specialists, according to a new survey by the physician recruiting firm Merritt Hawkins. In what Merrit Hawkins’ president referred to as a “seismic shift” in medicine, primary care doctors are now the greatest source of revenue for the hospitals where they work:

For the first time, primary care physicians are driving more revenue on a per-doctor basis to hospitals than are specialists, according to a survey of hospital chief financial officers by physician recruiting firm Merritt Hawkins. It’s expected that this result is not a fluke, but a reflection of the growing emphasis on primary care by hospitals and the health care system in general. [...]

Merritt Hawkins said there were major shifts in the health care system from 2010 to 2013 that put pressure on all physicians, particularly specialists. One major factor is the 2010 Affordable Care Act, which has several pieces that put more onus on primary care to cut overall costs and keep patients healthy, especially those with chronic conditions or who otherwise would delay care until they are seriously ill. The rise in primary care contributions came as overall per-physician revenue for hospitals fell — from more than $1.5 million in 2010 to more than $1.4 million in 2013. It’s the lowest median in the 11 years Merritt Hawkins has conducted the survey.

As more than 25 million previously uninsured Americans gain coverage under Obamacare, the trend toward primary care is expected to continue. Those people likely avoided expensive medical treatment while they didn’t have insurance, but they’ll have the opportunity to seek regular check-ups once they become covered in 2014. In order to tackle the influx of Americans who will require primary care services, there will be opportunities for nurse practitioners to expand their role as health care providers.

As state and federal officials work toward the full implementation of Obamacare, politicians on both sides of the aisle have blasted the ongoing effort as a “train wreck.” But there’s mounting evidence to suggest those concerns are overblown. Although there’s still more work to be done to prepare for the state-level insurance marketplaces that will open to the public in 2014, much of the health reform law is already in effect — and it’s already having a demonstrable impact on the United States’ health industry. In addition to the shift to primary care, Obamacare has also already ensured that health care will be cheaper for many Americans by forcing private insurers to lower their premiums.

At the end of last week, three Democratic legislators renewed their efforts to protect women from right-wing crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs), anti-abortion front groups that often use misleading advertising to market themselves as women’s health clinics. Sens. Robert Menendez (D-NJ), Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), and Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) have reintroduced the “Stop Deceptive Advertising For Women’s Services Act,” which would hold those facilities accountable for any deceptive marketing tactics that falsely advertise abortion services they don’t actually provide. The measure encourages the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to crack down on the facilities that falsely advertise abortion services that don’t actually exist, while the organizations that are already accurately depicting their services wouldn’t be penalized.

Crisis pregnancy centers have a long history of preying on vulnerable women with medical misinformation. CPCs present themselves as a valid alternative to women’s health clinics, hoping to lure in women who want more information about their reproductive options, but they actually use conservative propaganda to dissuade women from choosing an abortion. And CPCs like to locate themselves close to reproductive health facilities — often moving in right next door — specifically to confuse patients who may be seeking an abortion.

“Deception has no place when a woman is seeking information about her health or a pregnancy,” Maloney said in a statement introducing the new CPC legislation. “While I will defend crisis centers’ First Amendment rights even though I disagree with their view of abortion, those that practice bait-and-switch should be held accountable so that pregnant women are not deceived at an extremely vulnerable time in their lives.”

Nevertheless, CPCs across the country have largely escaped accountability by citing those First Amendment rights. In cities that have attempted to prevent crisis pregnancy centers from lying to women, CPCs have typically been able to overturn those ordinances by arguing that any additional regulation stifles their freedom of speech. But there has been some slow progress lately. Last year, a judge in San Francisco ruled that CPCs don’t deserve constitutional protections for their misleading advertisements. And lawmakers in Oregon are currently advancing a measure that would require the CPCs in that state to explicitly disclose accurate information about the medical services they offer.

So far, the federal bill to crack down on CPCs has won the support of NARAL Pro-Choice America. “We know these crisis pregnancy centers lie to women in the moment they most need accurate information to decide the future of their pregnancy and their lives,” Ilyse Hogue, NARAL’s president, said in response to the bill’s introduction. “We’re thrilled that Sen. Menendez is taking action to hold these fake ‘clinics’ accountable.”

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Shortly after informing the board of directors of her breast cancer, former CEO of Tuesday Morning was ousted as the head of the furniture retail company last June. Kathleen Mason, who served as CEO for 12 years, has filed a lawsuit against the company, claiming she was discriminated against.

The Wall Street Journal reports this may be an unprecedented lawsuit among cases over alleged discrimination:

While employee suits over alleged discrimination are common, it is rare for one to come from a former CEO. Ms. Mason’s lawsuit, filed on Thursday in county court in Dallas, claims the board wrongfully dismissed her because “it regarded her as being disabled” after she informed some fellow directors about her diagnosis.

Mason, 64 years old, said that she informed board members of her cancer in March and she was asked to resign in mid-May. The board eventually released a letter criticizing Mason hours before she was fired that read, “[she] led an extraordinary destruction of shareholder value.” The company denies her allegations, noting the company’s stock fell nearly 60 percent before she was fired.

Though the law is very clear that gender and health discrimination is illegal, women in the workplace still regularly face repercussions over getting pregnant, taking birth control, or contracting diseases that affect predominantly women. And based on the strong reactions to Angelina Jolie’s recent news that she had a preventative double mastectomy to reduce her risk of breast cancer, it’s clear that the stigma over health issues that affect a woman’s anatomy still exists.

It is unclear whether Mason experienced her own discrimination, but the issue is hardly a women-only issue. Examples abound where employees have lost their jobs over perceived weakness after they developed cancer or recovered from surgery.

This month, the political fight over emergency contraception has intensified, as the Obama administration continues to resist making the morning after pill available to women of all ages over the counter. After a federal judge ordered the FDA to remove all age restrictions on emergency contraception, the administration disagreed, maintaining that girls under 15 years old should still be required be obtain a prescription to purchase the contraceptive method — a position that baffles medical experts.

At the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ recent annual meeting, MedPage Today asked women’s health experts what they thought of the ongoing fight over Plan B. Multiple medical experts went on record to say that they don’t understand why emergency contraception has been such a contentious issue, and they don’t support restricting it for younger teens:

– Owen Montgomery, MD: “I would much rather have a 13- to 14-year-old girl who needs emergency contraception have access to it than come to my office with an unwanted pregnancy… In our clinics in the university, we see lots and lots of teenagers. And many of these young ladies have no access to good parental role models, and they need access to emergency contraception when they need access. And they can’t wait for permission from a judge, or someone else of authority.”

– Alison Edelman, MD, MPH, of Oregon Health & Science University: “Emergency contraception is a really, really important part of our toolkit for contraception. It helps women who have emergencies, i.e., they aren’t using contraception at the time of sexual activity or they had a misstep with their contraception, like a condom break or slip.”

– Barbara S. Levy, MD, ACOG’s vice president for health policy: “There’s failure of other methods. There are rapes. There are other things that occur. Women need to be able to access emergency contraception and have the knowledge and understanding of how to use it, so we can prevent unwanted pregnancies and unintended pregnancies that happen, because life happens.”

– Laurie J. McKenzie, MD, of both the University of Texas and Baylor College of Medicine: “I find it very interesting that there are these concessions that are being made in terms of age limitation … There are more deaths associated with Tylenol overdose than there are with oral contraceptive overdoses or potential overdose with Plan B. There have never, to my knowledge, been any overdoses with hormonal contraception.”

– Eve Espey, MD, MPH, of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque: “Plan B should be over the counter… All emergency contraceptives should be over the counter with no age restrictions.”

Indeed, there’s no scientific basis for imposing an age limit on Plan B. Multiple medical groups, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, have expressed support for making emergency contraception easily accessible to women of all ages.

Earlier this year, Arkansas Republicans overrode their governor to enact one of the harshest abortion restrictions in the nation, a 12-week ban that would criminalize one out of every 10 abortions in the state. But reproductive rights advocates are fighting back, taking the state to court and ultimately winning an injunction that will prevent the harsh law from going into effect.

The Center for Reproductive Rights, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the ACLU of Arkansas all joined forces to file a lawsuit against the extreme abortion ban, which oversteps Roe v. Wade‘s constitutional right to legal abortion services until about 22 to 24 weeks of pregnancy. On Friday afternoon, a federal judge ruled that the 12-week ban — which was set to take effect in August — cannot be enforced while that legal challenge is still pending.

Nancy Northrup, the president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, praised U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright’s decision to grant the injunction against the law. “Today’s decision ensures that the women of Arkansas will remain protected from this blatant unconstitutional assault on their health and fundamental reproductive rights,” Northrup said in a statement. “Such an extreme ban on abortion would have immediate and devastating consequences for women in Arkansas, especially those who could not afford to travel out of state to access reproductive health care.”

Wright’s decision to block the 12-week ban comes just days after her decision to dismiss Arkansas’ request to drop the lawsuit. Wright sided against the state on Wednesday, ruling that the reproductive rights groups may continue with their legal challenge.

Arkansas’ stringent abortion ban is topped only by a new law in North Dakota, which would cut off legal access to abortion services after just six weeks — before many women even realize they’re pregnant. Both laws are “heartbeat” measures, which seek to criminalize abortion after the fetus’ heartbeat can first be detected — a random cut-off that isn’t based in any scientific definition of viability.

This week, news broke that a Michigan school district is barring two teens from displaying their pregnant bellies in their school yearbook. The school district’s superintendent explained that depicting images of teen pregnancy in the yearbook goes against the school’s mission of “promoting abstinence.” One of the pregnant teens said she “went to the bathroom and cried” upon hearing the news.

Aside from the ironic fact that teens who receive abstinence-only education are actually more likely to become pregnant than the students who receive accurate sexual health information about prevention methods, the situation in Michigan also illustrates the pervasive negativity that Americans associate with teenage pregnancies. That attitude ultimately creates a environment that punishes, stigmatizes, and shames young mothers — many of whom are subject to much larger structural issues that are out of their control, like the type of sex education they received in school or the level of poverty they were born into.

Unfortunately, the situation in Michigan is hardly the only example of this dynamic in play. Here are five other instances of teen moms being shamed instead of supported:

1. A North Carolina high schooler’s photo won’t appear in her yearbook because she posed with her newborn son. One teen mom in North Carolina can relate all too well to the pregnant students in Michigan. After posing for a photo with her baby son, she was told that the picture wouldn’t be allowed to appear in the yearbook this year. The school claimed that the image would “promote teen pregnancy” and told the student she had two days to submit a different photo without her son. She declined, saying, “If he wasn’t going to be in it with me, I didn’t want be in it at all.”

2. One Louisiana high school banned pregnant teens from attending classes on campus altogether. Last year, a charter school in Louisiana received significant backlash for its policy forbidding pregnant students from remaining on campus. According to the school handbook, pregnant students were required to either switch to another school or begin a home school program — and if the school “suspected” a girl of being pregnant, administrators could force her to take a pregnancy test to find out for sure. After the ACLU stepped in to file a formal discrimination complaint, the Louisiana Department of Education ordered the school to drop its policy.

3. A celebrity-studded national campaign tells teens that being a mother is incompatible with being successful. Public service campaigns that stigmatize young parents are all too common. Teens are often bombarded with negative messages intended to dissuade them from having a baby at a young age — but instead of focusing on effective information about tools to prevent pregnancy, like information about where to access affordable birth control or other family planning support, these ads simply focus on how teen mothers’ lives are ruined. Many of them also have the added effect of dismissing parenthood altogether. A recent campaign from the Candie’s Foundation depicts celebrity’s faces alongside these messages, including Carly Rae Jepson proclaiming that being a mother prevents women from achieving great things:

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Which hospital in the United States charges its patients the highest bills for common medical procedures? It turns out that the nation’s most expensive hospital is located in Bayonne, NJ, where you’ll pay nearly $100,000 dollars to treat your case of chronic lung disease — five times as much as what others hospitals charge for the same procedure.

Last week, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released first-of-its-kind data detailing the prices that hospitals charge for common procedures. The new numbers revealed that there’s a huge range of price fluctuations between different hospitals, with no good reason for why some places are charging so much more than others. Bayonne Medical Center topped the list, billing at a rate more than four times the national average for the 100 most common types of medical treatments.

Does that mean that, since patients at Bayonne are paying extremely well for their time in the hospital, they’re receiving particularly good care? Not really. The New York Times points out that Bayonne Medical Center ranks about average in terms of the quality of its care, no better or worse than most other hospitals in New Jersey. That fits into the broader national trends regarding health costs and health quality — spending more on care isn’t actually correlated with better treatment.

The Obama administration, which is encouraging greater price transparency in the health care industry as one of the central tenets of Obamacare, hopes that making hospital costs public could help encourage Americans to shop around. If New Jersey residents decide they’d rather not receive the particularly expensive care at Bayonne Medical, maybe they’ll decide to go to a different hospital in the area — and maybe that will force Bayonne to lower its prices to stay competitive.

But addressing the United States’ sky-high medical costs isn’t just about better educating patients. In fact, there’s evidence that teaching doctors more about the actual costs of the procedures they’re recommending can also help. Studies have shown that doctors are less likely to order unnecessary tests and procedures when they know how expensive they are. And, in order to further continue to cut down on wasteful medical spending, the U.S. needs to do more research on which specific types of health spending could be pared down without sacrificing the quality of Americans’ health care.

Developing nations around the world aren’t doing enough to ensure that women have access to the family planning services they need, a new report from the Guttmacher Institute finds. The women who want to prevent pregnancy but don’t have access to modern forms of birth control are concentrated mostly in poorer countries, and those countries are lagging far behind wealthier nations when it comes to ensuring women’s ability to use the contraceptive services of their choice.

And the problem is getting worse. Between 2003 and 2012, the total number of women in need of birth control because they wanted to avoid pregnancy increased from 716 million to 867 million — and most of that growth was among women in the 69 poorest countries, where birth control is already more difficult to come by. About 222 million women in developing countries want to use birth control but aren’t currently able to access a modern contraceptive method, and nearly three quarters of those women live in the world’s poorest countries.

“Unless the adequacy of family planning services improves more rapidly than it has in the past decade, he number of women with an unmet need for modern contraceptives will continue to rise, especially in the 69 poorest countries,” Jacqueline E. Darroch, one of the study’s authors, explained in a statement.

Last year, the United Nations declared access to contraception to be a “universal human right.” But that right isn’t being realized for millions of women around the world — and the continued failure to ensure better access to modern birth control results in serious consequences for women in developing nations. Higher rates of unintended pregnancies lead to higher rates of preventable deaths from unsafe abortions, as well as higher rates of infant deaths around the world. Furthermore, giving women the family planning resources they need is an important step toward helping those women achieve economic success and independence.

Unfortunately, persistent class divides plague contraception access even in wealthy nations. Here in the United States, poorer women still struggle to access the birth control method of their choice — and research has demonstrated that when cost barriers are removed, those low-income women choose more effective methods than they would have otherwise.

A seven-year investigation into Yale University’s sexual assault policy has resulted in a $165,000 fine for the prestigious university, which failed to accurately report the number of sexual crimes on campus. Underreporting rape cases is a violation of the Clery Act, which requires colleges to disclose those crime statistics to the U.S. government.

The U.S. Department of Education first began investigating Yale in 2004, when a Yale Alumni Magazine article brought the mishandled sexual assault cases to the attention of the community. The resulting investigation verified that the university failed to report four cases of sex offenses on its campus in 2001 and 2002. Over the past several years, Yale has worked with the Department of Education to improve its reporting policies — but federal officials maintain that those efforts don’t eliminate the seriousness of the university’s past failings, or the need for some kind of punishment. Yale is being fined $27,500 for each of the unreported crimes.

“This is a serious violation because current and prospective students/employees must be able to rely on accurate and complete crime information,” Mary Gust, the director of the Department of Educations’s Administrative Actions and Appeals Service Group, said in a letter to Yale. “Yale’s correction of the crime statistics only after the department alerted the university of its obligations in 2004 does not excuse its earlier failure to comply with its legal obligations.”

The situation on Yale’s campus mirrors similar issues at other universities across the country that are continuing to grapple with rape culture. Particularly at elite institutions, administrators are often accused of sweeping sexual assault under the rug in order to maintain their school’s prestigious reputation. Amherst College, Swarthmore College, Dartmouth College, and Harvard University are just a few of the universities that have made recent headlines for allegedly creating a hostile environment for survivors of sexual assault.

Some college activists are beginning to mobilize to push for change on their campuses, and there has been some gradual progress recently. But as Yale demonstrates, that change can be painfully slow. The university is only now being fined for violations that occurred over a decade ago — and since then, students brought forth another complaint in 2011, and the rate of sexual assaults on campus soared to “historic levels” this year.

The Obama Administration took a big step on Thursday to ensure that kids in child care are safe. Speaking before a D.C.-area day care, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced strict new regulatory rules — the first in 15 years — for child care facilities across the nation.

The newly announced regulations will apply to any child care center or family home that receives federal funding through HHS’s Child Care and Development Fund. Among the expanded rules are universal background checks and fingerprinting for child care workers, mandatory CPR and first aid training for such employees, and “safe sleeping practices” to prevent accidental suffocation deaths. “We frankly can’t wait any longer,” said Sebelius of the regulations.

Administration officials and child safety advocates hope that the requirements will put a dent in the depressingly high number of young children who die as a consequence of negligent care and unsafe practices. For instance, three-month-old baby boy Dane died after a child care worker “put him face-down on a blanket and left him for an hour” — just one example of a child death that the new rules’ safe sleeping component might have prevented.

Federal rules governing these care facilities are currently limited to preventing infectious epidemics and making sure that buildings meet fire safety codes. For the most part, states are left to their own discretion in coming up with more expansive regulations — making the new federal standards particularly significant.

However, the new requirements only apply to the 513,000 child care centers that receive federal money. That means that thousands of other facilities that care for children will still answer to watered-down rules that are left up to the states — and considering how lax some states’ standards are, that’s a big problem.

In a 2010 report, the child safety organization Child Care Aware of America found that nine states scored zero points on their child care safety score sheet. Some of these states, including Iowa, Idaho, and Virginia, require a child care facility to serve seven or more children before requiring state licensing or inspections; eight other states, including Texas, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and South Carolina, do not require a facility inspection or even an on-site visit before issuing a child care license; and Louisiana and New Jersey don’t require any child care facilities to receive a state license at all. “Unfortunately, in too many cases, it takes well-publicized deaths in child-care settings to prompt state action to strengthen their licensing standards to better address children’s safety,” an HHS official told the Washington Post.

While child care advocates are encouraged by the new federal rules, many still acknowledge that real reform requires congressional action, as well as more funding for the federal Child Care and Development Fund. The Fund was last reauthorized by Congress in 1996.

The issue of sexual assault on college campuses has captured headlines over the past several months, as students and faculty on several college campuses have filed formal complaints with the U.S. Department of Education alleging that their universities’ administrations have underreported rape cases or mistreated rape victims. In response, a network of campus activists have taken advantage of the current momentum around rape culture to push for change.

Now, on campuses across the country, their work is beginning to have an impact. Change is slow, and there’s no guarantee that university administrations will make an immediate turnaround. But the following institutions are taking small steps in the right direction to ensure that students’ concerns are being heard and sexual crimes are being taken seriously:

University of Montana: After a yearlong federal investigation into the way that UM officials deal with sexual crimes, the university reached a settlement with the Department of Justice and the Department of Education last week. UM agreed to an overhaul of its sexual assault policies, which the administration will implement over the next two years. The federal government is hailing the UM settlement as a success story and hoping it can serve as a model for campuses across the country, although some campus activists are a bit more skeptical that it will bring about dramatic change. But it’s a start. In another encouraging sign for Montana students, the DOJ also reached a settlement with the Missoula Police Department this week, which will officially compel the local police force to stop mistreating survivors of sexual assault.

University of North Carolina: UNC is currently undergoing a federal investigation for mishandling rape cases on campus, and a new campus task force charged with resolving the issue is hoping to look to the University of Montana for guidance as it works to update its own protocol. The university formed a 22-member task force this week to review UNC’s sexual assault policies and look for areas of reform. Since the five women who filed the federal complaint against UNC alleged that the current sexual assault policy was too vague, perhaps partly because it was written by just a handful of select administrators, the task force will include student and faculty representatives.

Stanford University: At the beginning of this month, Stanford announced that the administration will partner with student groups to initiate a campus-wide campaign around issues of sexual assault and rape culture. The student activists who initiated the campaign explained that they hope it will help spark a broader conversation about preventing sexual assaults by teaching students more about consent. “The idea behind it was that there are conversations had about sexual assault on campus but there isn’t always space for discourse just about consent, or having a more positive constructive conversation about consent,” undergrad explained.

University of Notre Dame: Two years ago, the Department of Education investigated Notre Dame’s handling of sexual assault cases and recommended that the administration strengthen its policy for reporting and investigating these types of crimes on campus. Since then, the administration has worked to overhaul its system, and developed a student questionnaire to solicit more feedback about areas it can improve. At the end of last month, the results from that survey revealed that the majority of the student body understood how to navigate the new system for reporting sexual crimes, and 75 percent of students said they believed the administration handled rape cases “effectively and fairly.” Students did indicate that they want university officials to offer more education around consent.

The University of Maryland: This week, administrators at UMD agreed to explore a sexual assault awareness pilot program for all incoming freshmen, the first step toward implementing a proposal to require every incoming student to attend a mandatory workshop on the issue. Under the pilot, about 30 percent of next year’s incoming students would receive information about preventing sexual crimes. And earlier this month, the student senate voted to expand the university’s jurisdiction to address sexual violations — a move that could help ensure that rape victims whose assaults occur off campus can still access administrative resources.

Of course, that doesn’t mean the issue is anywhere close to resolved. Universities still have a long way to go to effectively eliminate the rape culture dynamics that often permeate their student disciplinary systems. A recent national survey conducted by the group Students Active For Ending Rape asked college students to grade their school’s sexual assault policies, and half of the respondents gave them a C or lower. A mere 9.8 percent of students gave their university an A for handling rape cases well.