Since Dafna Meir’s death at the hands of a teenage Palestinian stabber January 17, the 38-year-old Israeli has been memorialized as a mother and a wife, a foster parent and a nurse. But to a certain subset of Israeli women she will be remembered for a different reason: She was the leader of the “diaphragm…
When I first read Alana Massey’s recent piece in The Atlantic, about period-suppression, I wondered if it was sponsored content for a pharmaceutical company, specifically Bayer, the makers of the Mirena IUD. Massey interviews a number of women who’ve endured incapacitating menstrual cycles, and I can empathize. I have had painful, debilitating periods since the…
Carl Djerassi, an Austrian-born chemist who helped to develop the birth control pill before becoming a playwright and novelist, died in San Francisco on Friday at the age of 91, his family said. Djerassi, professor emeritus at Stanford University, was the leader of a team of researchers in Mexico City who synthesized a derivative of…
Jonathan Eig is The New York Times best-selling author of “Luckiest Man,” “Opening Day,” “Get Capone,” and now, “The Birth of the Pill,” about the race to produce the birth control pill. Before writing books, Eig worked as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, Chicago magazine, The Dallas Morning News and the Times-Picayune. He…
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday ruled that business owners can object on religious grounds to a provision of President Barack Obama’s healthcare law that requires closely held companies to provide health insurance that covers birth control. The court held on a 5-4 vote on ideological lines that such companies can seek an exemption from…
Corporations are people, Mitt Romney famously said at the Iowa State Fair in 2011, and it’s easy now to dismiss the phrase as the awkward, revealing statement of a man so out of tune with the public that he lost an election he was supposed to win. But in March, the U.S. Supreme Court will…
Last week, my post on why Jews should care about the Hobby Lobby contraception case, and my subsequent defense of its points, caused a furor on right-wing Twitter. The collectivist principles inherent in insurance, the fact that the Affordable Care Act’s expanded coverage is associated with President Obama, and the promotion of women’s bodily autonomy…
Last week the Supreme Court agreed to hear Hobby Lobby Stores Inc. v. Sebelius and Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp. v. Sebelius, two cases about the conflict between Obamacare mandates and religion. Specifically, they examine whether for-profit corporations can refuse to provide employees with certain types of contraception (those that prevent fertilized eggs from implanting), which…
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