Small cost for women’s freedom to choose
Access to contraception Is essential for gender equality, both to ensure that women don’t become mothers unless they want to and to prevent abortions.
Women’s Health
Read More » Small cost for women’s freedom to choose
Quarter of pregnancies globally may end in abortion
Almost 90 percent of abortions occur in the developing world, pointing to an unmet need for contraception among the bulk of the world’s women, finds a new report.
R9 billion needed to close contraception gap
More than 20 million young women are not accessing contraception globally, resulting in about 10 million unintended pregnancies each year, according to a new report by US reproductive health and rights organisation Guttmacher Institute.
Gates Foundation to invest R1.2b to close data gap
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will invest about R1.2 billion in the next three years to enable countries to count women and girls, and generate crucial data on hundreds of thousands of women around the world.
Blood on the floor: Women’s deaths a ‘national emergency’
Hundreds of women each year die following caesarean deliveries. With rates of caesarean deliveries climbing, the stage may be set for more deaths to come.
Report: Saving Mothers 2011 – 2013
This 91-page condensed version of South Africa’s latest maternal death audit shows that although maternal deaths are decreasing, worrying trends in the deaths of new and expecting moms persist.
East Rand hospital allegedly discharges woman with fistula
Vuyolwethu Noteyi, 21, claims Vosloorus’ Thelle Mogoerane Regional Hospital discharged her with a fistula and that doctors refused to fix it for months until Health-e News intervened.
Municipality repairs week-long sewage leak
Limpopo's Thulamela Local Municipality has fixed a burst sewer pipe that sent putrid sewage spilling onto Thohoyandou city streets for about a week, but residents say they want to know why repairs took so long.
[Updated]The hidden violence: Women and attempted suicide
For hundreds of murdered South African women, the last face they see is a face they used to love. Almost 60 percent of women murdered annually may die by their partner’s hands but who is counting the women who die by their own hands when violence at home becomes too much, asks Garret Barnwell.
Patents could block access to breast cancer treatment for decades
The approval of patents related to a breast cancer drug has allegedly given pharmaceutical giant Roche a near monopoly on a life-saving. When the price of life may be as much as R500,000, your bank balance may be a matter of life and death.
Report: 2013 National Antenatal Sentinel HIV Prevalence Survey
Conducted in 2013, the country’s latest antenatal survey finds an HIV prevalence rate of about 30 percent among pregnant women.
When a child gives birth, who has failed her?
When a 12-year-old girl slides onto your operating table for a caesarean section, it's hard not to ask how she got here – and the answer seems to lie somewhere in the distance between cities and villages and in the family planning gap between the "have's" and "have not's"
A kinder, gentler birth
Imagine being in labour, vulnerable and scared and being told by hospital staff to clean up your own blood. For years, reports of women being abused during labour at public health facilities have made headlines. Now, a kinder, gentler birth for many South Africa women may come from an unlikely place.
Are we obsessed with tighter vaginas?
A Chinese dried fruit delicacy is selling like hot cakes in the Free State as women believe the fruit will give them tighter, more youthful vaginas. Experts say the obsession with the mythical tight vagina says as about our understanding of anatomy as it does about our times.
Women on front lines as Free State health crumbles
The Free State Health Department has lost almost a quarter of its doctors in the last year. At Welkom’s Bongani Regional Hospital, the strain is beginning to show with deadly consequences for Free State women.