Tag: equity

Baby feet in hands

Colorado Passes Landmark Birth Equity Bill Package

Alexa Richardson Leave a comment

By Alexa Richardson

This month, activists in Colorado succeeded in passing a sweeping package of bills designed to address lack of access, inequities, and mistreatment throughout the obstetric system.

The ambitious provisions offer a new model for legislative approaches to transforming maternity care.

The bills, SB21-193, SB21-194, and SB21-101, were crafted in large part through the efforts of Elephant Circle, an organization that advocates birth justice by promoting self-determination and support for pregnant people, and tackling power and oppression. In an interview, Elephant Circle Founder and Director, Indra Lusero, described the Birth Equity Bill Package as “an opportunity to change the conversation by pulling together the broad range of issues facing pregnant people and presenting them as one coherent policy platform.”

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Miami Downtown, FL, USA - MAY 31, 2020: Woman leading a group of demonstrators on road protesting for human rights and against racism.

Intentional Commitments to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion Needed in Health Care

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Eloho E. Akpovi

“They told me my baby was going to die.” Those words have sat with me since my acting internship in OB/GYN last summer. They were spoken by a young, Black, pregnant patient presenting to the emergency room to rule out preeclampsia.

As a Black woman and a medical student, those words were chilling. They reflect a health care system that is not built to provide the best care for Black patients and trains health care professionals in a way that is tone-deaf to racism and its manifestations in patient care.

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Assortment of menstrual products.

Period Poverty and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Policy Challenges and Opportunities

Cara Tenenbaum Leave a comment

By Cara Tenenbaum

Despite the need for period products among all who menstruate, there are few policies addressing the associated financial burdens.

Monthly menstrual product expenses average $13.25 per month, according to one survey. These costs are prohibitive for some, contributing to the phenomenon known as “period poverty,” which describes a lack of access to period products due to cost.

Period poverty, like so many other health inequities, has gotten worse during the Coronavirus pandemic. This post addresses the challenges and opportunities to address period poverty at federal, state, and local levels.

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Empty classroom.

Can Schools Require the COVID-19 Vaccine? Education, Equity, and the Courts

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Emily Caputo and Blake N. Shultz

As school systems consider policy options for the spring semester, both vaccination requirements and proposals to address inequities in access to education may be top of mind. However, policymakers should be aware of the possible legal challenges they may face.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created an educational crisis in the United States by disrupting the learning of millions of students across the country. School closures, remote learning, and generalized societal stress have all raised serious concerns about persistent harm to adolescent learning and development — particularly among low-income and minority students.

While the pandemic has exposed widespread inequities in educational opportunity, it has also revealed the relative inability of the courts to promote access to education. A recent California lawsuit illustrates the manner in which students must rely on state-level, rather than federal, protections to ensure equal access to education. And COVID-19 vaccination requirements, which could facilitate a return to in-person education, are likely to result in lawsuits, and may be struck down by a skeptical and conservative Supreme Court.

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Society or population, social diversity. Flat cartoon vector illustration.

The Cost of Exclusion in Psychedelic Research

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Xinyuan Chen, Mackenzie Bullard, Christy Duan, Jamilah R. George, Terence Ching, Stephanie Kilpatrick, Jordan Sloshower, and Monnica Williams

In the last two decades, researchers have started to reexamine psychedelics for their therapeutic potential. Though initial results seem promising, the research has a significant shortcoming: the lack of racial and ethnic diversity among research teams and study participants.

In the 1960s, psychedelic substances such as LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline were a major part of American counterculture. Less well-known is that, concurrently, researchers were studying potential therapeutic uses of these mind-altering substances. Unfortunately, psychedelics were classified as Schedule I drugs in 1970, halting research into their therapeutic benefits.

The recent renaissance of psychedelic research shows these substances have significant capabilities for treating anxiety, depression, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and substance use disorders. But these promising results are limited in their applicability: an analysis from 2018 showed that 82.3% of all study participants in psychedelic trials internationally were non-Hispanic Whites, and only 2.5% were African-American.

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Close-up of a stethoscope on an American flag

Why Justice is Good for America’s Health

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Dayna Bowen Matthew

Justice is good for health [and] . . . health is the byproduct of justice.

— Norman Daniels, Bruce Kennedy & Ichiro Kawachi (Boston Review, 2000)

Among the most salient lessons to be learned from the coronavirus pandemic are that unjust laws produce unjust health outcomes, and that justice is just plain good for America’s health.

Health justice is the moral mandate to protect and advance an equal opportunity for all to enjoy greatest health and well-being possible. Health justice means that no one person or group of people are granted or excluded from the means of pursuing health on an inequitable basis. To achieve health justice, societal institutions such as governments and health care providers must act to advance equality, by increasing fairness and decreasing unfairness of their current and historic impacts on populations.

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people sitting in conference hall.

All-Male Panels, or ‘Manels,’ Must End

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Kelly Wright and Louise P. King

In this day and age, there is no room for all-male panels, or “manels,” as they are commonly known.

Yet, a quick search of Twitter for #manels or #allmalepanel reveals it remains the norm, with picture after picture of them occurring in a wide array of scientific and medical disciplines. Some try to excuse the error with a woman moderator – a “mom-erator” doing the “housekeeping” of managing the presentations. This is just as bad, if not worse.

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A data set that looks like America

Oliver Kim Leave a comment

By Oliver Kim

May marks the annual Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, which recognizes the history and contributions of this diverse population in the United States. Accounting for that diversity though is one of the challenges facing the Asian American-Pacific Islander (AAPI) community: for example, the Library of Congress commemorative website recognizes that AAPI is a “rather broad term” that can include

all of the Asian continent and the Pacific islands of Melanesia (New Guinea, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, Fiji and the Solomon Islands), Micronesia (Marianas, Guam, Wake Island, Palau, Marshall Islands, Kiribati, Nauru and the Federated States of Micronesia) and Polynesia (New Zealand, Hawaiian Islands, Rotuma, Midway Islands, Samoa, American Samoa, Tonga, Tuvalu, Cook Islands, French Polynesia and Easter Island).

Understanding that diversity has huge policy and political implications, particularly in health policy. Read More

Housing Equity Week in Review

Temple University Center for Public Health Law Research Leave a comment

Here is our weekly round-up of developments from the world of housing law and health. For the week of August 7-14, 2017:

  • HUD released its “Worst Case Housing Needs” report to Congress providing national data and analysis of the problems facing low-income renting families. CityLab offers a summary of the report here.
  • Is California’s housing laws making its housing crisis worse? Natalie Delgadillo at Governing analyzes the impact of the 1985 Ellis Act, which allows landlords to mass-evict tenants in order to leave the rental business.
  • A new study from University of Hawaii researchers finds homelessness and inadequate housing are major causes of unnecessary hospitalizations. Read more.
  • HUD is inviting paper submissions for a symposium on housing and health. Submissions will be accepted through September 30. Full details here.
  • A new Colorado law requires landlords to give 21-days notice of rent increases and lease terminations, via HousingWire.
  • Amy Clark at the National Housing Conference offers an explanation of YIMBYism — “yes, in my backyard” — via NHC’s Open House blog.