Our Bodies
Ourselves in the News (continued...)
Prevention
First, a coalition of independent health organizations including
the Our Bodies Ourselves, recently submitted
comments at a National Institute of Health (NIH) workshop on
menopause and hormone replacement therapy. Judy Norsigian,
executive director of OBOS, presented the comments, which called on
the NIH to do the following:
- Invest in research that will increase
our understanding of the critical role of clean air, clean water
and healthy food for safeguarding our health and preventing
disease, rather than relying so overwhelmingly on long-term use of
prescription drugs and other medical interventions.
- Strengthen regulation of drug
advertising and promotion to consumers and health care providers
to ensure that both groups receive full and correct information
about promoted products.
- Strengthen enforcement of existing
regulations, so that meaningful action against companies that
violate those standards is possible.
OBOS executive director Judy Norsigian
was chosen to receive the 2002 Massachusetts Health Council award.
The award is given annually to individuals who have made outstanding
contributions to the advancement of the general health of the
citizens of the Commonwealth. The award was presented on Oct. 21,
2002 by former Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis.
Do you remember the first time you read
Our Bodies, Ourselves? Historian Wendy Kline is conducting an
online survey to document the impact of the book on women’s lives.
You can take the survey yourself or read the results.
To mark Women's History Month, Women's
Enews asked leaders of the second wave of the U.S. women's movement
to look back on their work and answer three questions: In 1972, what
were they fighting for? What did they accomplish? And what remains
to be done? OBOS founder Jane Pincus took on the challenge, and her
commentary, How a Group of Friends Transformed Women's Health,
is posted at the Women's Enews website.
Our 2001 year-end
newsletter is out! Read all about the activities and
accomplishments of Our Bodies Ourselves during the past
year.
As the US Congress considers various
legislation to ban human cloning, and as it has become clear that
experimentation with cloning human embryos is already underway, OBOS
is asking women's health activists and others to take a close look
at the myriad of issues surrounding this debate. Embryo cloning
opens the door to the creation of genetic duplicate humans as well
as to so-called "therapeutic" cloning (where stem cells would be
harvested from a clonal embryo for research related only to
developing medical therapies). There are important distinctions to
be made between embryonic stem cell research using embryos NOT
created via cloning techniques (for example, embryos created at in
vitro fertilization clinics) and creating embryos for "therapeutic"
clonal embryo research.
OBOS believes that embryo cloning is
unnecessary at this time for embryonic stem cell research and
therefore calls for a 5-year moratorium on the creation of human
clonal embryos . We encourage others to support the statement
posted here at our website.
To read more about feminist perspectives
on human cloning, click
here.
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