menstruation

Credit: CC0 Public Domain Managing menstruation in public can be challenging at the best of times, but imagine being eight years old and having to deal with your period at school. You might need to change your pad during class and explain to your friends why you are not going to the swimming carnival. You might be scared you will bleed through your uniform because there aren't any sanitary bins in the junior years' bathroom.…

According to this book, there are more than 5,000 euphemisms around the world for menstruation. Not that its author, Dr Jen Gunter, tends to be euphemistic. Once described as “the world’s most famous – and outspoken – gynaecologist”, she is already the author of The Menopause Manifesto and The Vagina Bible – a book that became a bestseller despite ads for it being banned on social media because algorithms flagged “vulgar, obscene or distasteful” words.Language and the naming of things are important to Gunter, and she is…

The doctor who taught me about human reproduction at medical school was in fact a veterinarian. More is known about a sheep’s rhythms than a woman’s, he said, setting the tone in our first tutorial, presumably because ewes drive a healthy profit. I was disappointed. I felt that menstruation and pregnancy shouldn’t be narrated to us like they would be for any other animal. These aren’t just biological events, but experiences coloured by memory and anticipation. What about days of frantic maxi pad changes in school cubicles…

Image Source : AMAZON ALEXA Amazon Alexa In a bid to encourage more families to have open conversations around menstruation, Amazon UK has trained its virtual assistant technology Alexa on how to give the advice to manage periods, the e-commerce company said. UK teenagers can now ask questions such as "Alexa, what is regular period pain?", "Alexa, can periods affect my…

A proposed bill in Florida would prevent children from learning about menstruation in elementary school, even though some girls get their first periods in those years. The bill would also ban other sex education topics through the fifth grade. Sponsored by Republican Florida state Rep. Stan McClain, the bill advanced out of the House Education Quality…

For as long as there have been vaccines, there has been vaccine misinformation—and surprisingly often it has focused on fertility. The COVID vaccines have been no exception. False claims that vaccination provokes the immune system to attack the placenta circulated even before the vaccines were available. No sooner had data been presented to disprove these claims than others sprang up. Despite extensive evidence that COVID vaccination does not harm fertility, these unfounded rumors were a major source of vaccine hesitancy…

Credit: tommaso79 / Shutterstock Discrimination against and repression of women is a global problem. In authoritarian states, it is also intertwined with regime survival. Take recent events in Iran, where women-led protests against strict hijab laws are challenging the country's ruling powers. Nearly 3,000 miles away in China, a different feminist debate is taking hold, over whether sanitary pads should be sold on high-speed…

Kathryn Clancy got her first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine in early 2021 and 10 days later found herself sitting uncomfortably in a work Zoom meeting during one of the heaviest periods she’d experienced. “I had what’s often called menstrual flooding,” says Clancy, a biological anthropologist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Clancy wouldn’t have thought to connect the experience to the Moderna dose she’d received were it not for her graduate student, Katharine Lee, now…

NEW DELHI: On the occasion of World Menstrual Hygiene Day, Randeep Guleria, director, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, called for breaking the stigma around menstruation. “In many parts of the country, women are not allowed to enter kitchen or stigma at the workplace when women have their normal physiological cycle of mensuration," said Guleria. “It is important for all of us especially for men to understand that menstruation cycle is normal and there should be no stigma. For…