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Women’s Health

 

Abortion Funding. . .New Wave Of Despair Faces Medi-Cal Patients (PDF) 

It was some years before the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973, and it was a fairly typical experience for pregnant and unmarried women of some means. 

Abortion: The View from the Clinic (PDF)(Distributed by McClatchy News Service, reprinted from the Sacramento Bee)

It was some years before the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973, and it was a fairly typical experience for pregnant and unmarried women of some means. 

 

Nursing 

Harassed Nurses…War of Sexes Rages In Hospital, They Insist (Part 1) (PDF)

Lorrie Morris was 18 years old and a student nurse working in a county hospital when she learned a harsh lesson about how to behave around physicians. The year was 1947.

  Doctor-Nurse Game Breaking Up (Part 2) (PDF)

“Biology made the female the nurse of the species.” Dr. Victor Robinson wrote in his 1946 history of nursing, “White Caps.” “The first mother who leaned over the first cradle of leaves in the primitive forest was the first nurse.”

  Often When A Nurse Speaks Up, She Risks Doctors’ Wrath, Firing (Part 3)  (PDF)

A physician in a small San Joaquin valley town recently was arguing – amicably – with his partner about the influence of doctors over nurses in hospitals.

  Training, Economics Shape Doctors’ View of Nurses (Part 4)  (PDF)

Dr. Paul O’Rourke is a Harvard-trained physician with a generally low opinion of the American medical system. His views are hardly those of most physicians.

 Nursing On The Road To Professional Growth (Part 5) (PDF)

“As a society, we have much to answer for in our treatment of nursing,” the National Commission for the Study of Nursing and Nursing Education reported in 1973. “We have under-compensated, mis-utilized and bullied the profession for years. Hardly any proposal for improvement has not be attacked; almost none has been implemented.

  Nurse-Midwives Caught In Web of Medical Politics (PDF)

JoAnn Ruiz attended the birth of a baby one October afternoon in 1977. The birth was normal, the baby 7 1/2 pounds and healthy.

 

  Midwifery Dispute In Judicial Limbo (PDF)

Lay midwives were legal in California from 1917 to 1949 when licensing was halted with the hospital-born baby boom following World War II.

 

Letters From The People (PDF)

Congratulations to Sigrid Bathen and to The Bee for the compelling series on the dilemma of modern nursing.