Women

Time - Florida's ban on most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, before many women even know they are pregnant, went into effect Wednesday, and some doctors are concerned that women in the state will no longer have access to needed health care.Dr. Leah Roberts, a reproductive endocrinologist and fertility specialist with Boca Fertility in Boca Raton, said the anti-abortion laws being enacted by Florida and other red states are being vaguely written by people who don't understand medical science. The rules are affecting not just women who want therapeutic abortions, meaning procedures to terminate viable pregnancies because of personal choice, but also nonviable pregnancies for women who want to have babies.

“We’re coming in between them and their doctors and preventing them from getting care until it’s literally saving their lives, sometimes at the expense of their fertility,” Roberts said. The new ban has an exception for saving a woman's life, as well as in cases involving rape and incest, but Roberts said health care workers are still prevented from performing an abortion on a nonviable pregnancy that they know may become deadly — such as when the fetus is missing organs or implanted outside the uterus — until it actually becomes deadly.  “We’re being told that we have to wait until the mother is septic to be able to intervene,” Roberts said. Besides the physical danger, there's also the psychological trauma of having to carry a fetus that the mother knows will never be a healthy baby, Roberts said.

Time -Most women should start mammogram screenings for breast cancer at age 40, and get screened every other year until they reach age 75, according to new recommendations from an expert panel. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, which is an independent group of experts funded by the government, regularly reviews data and makes recommendations on health issues, and many health providers follow them. It decided to revise its advice on mammogram screening that was last issued in 2016. That guideline said women should start regular mammogram screening every other year beginning at age 50, and that women ages 40 to 49 should discuss with their doctors the best screening regimen for them.

The new recommendation is based on additional evidence that has emerged since 2016, says Dr. John Wong, vice chair of USPSTF. According to data from the National Cancer Institute, the rates of breast cancer for women in their 40s began increasing by 2% annually in 2015, and that trend justified a change in the recommendations to start screening a decade earlier. “Our current data shows that this recommendation could potentially save as many as one out of five women who would otherwise die if they waited to be screened until they were 50,” says Wong. “That’s potentially saving 25,000 women from dying of breast cancer. We think that’s a big win.