Janet Fraser, a home birth advocate and founder of the site Joyous Birth, recently experienced a personal tragedy when her baby died at her home in Australia on March 27 during her free birth or unassisted childbirth (where a woman gives birth at home without the aid of a midwife or doctor).

I consider myself to be a pretty eco-conscious kinda gal. I mean, I do all the right eco-trippy things: I reduce, I re-use, I recycle, I blog about same. And I`m pretty willing to adopt whatever eco-friendly practice anybody tells me might help save the planet. Turn out my lights for an hour? No problem. Stop drinking bottled water? Done. Tell people to stop having babies? Err... what?

There are a lot of ways to change the world. Because, face it: bringing about any of kind of change is best effected incrementally. You don't just set off one morning to run a marathon; you put on running shoes, you do some stretching, you run around the block, you come home and then you keep repeating, running longer and faster with every new attempt. Likewise with changing the world: it's the little incremental steps that do the trick. If we set out to just all of a sudden force a transformation, we wouldn't be very successful. Also, we'd probably get really bad cramps.

Lilly Ledbetter. Coverage of pregnant women under SCHIP. And now, the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on International Operations and Organizations, Human Rights, Democracy, and Global Women's Issues.

When my daughter was born four and a half years ago, I had no plan for how long I would breastfeed her, I just knew that I would start off breastfeeding and then go with the flow. It so happens that in our case going with the flow meant that one month shy of her fourth birthday she was still nursing (albeit only once a day), and as I would soon discover, we weren't the only ones on this path. I wrote my thoughts about this shortly before her fourth birthday in a post titled On Nursing a Preschooler.

The holiday season is in full force - a time that, at least in theory, should be filled with joy and happiness. But what if you find yourself having feelings that are far from those of joy and happiness? Feelings of hopelessness, agitation, guilt and even lifelessness?

Last week, Lisa Belkin, parenting blogger at The NY Times, wrote about the upcoming 20/20 special on the film "Orgasmic Birth." The topic apparently hit a nerve with many, many people as she quickly received more than 500 comments. Many people, as to be expected, are skeptical. Mir of Woulda Coulda Shoulda had the most humorous response I read to the idea. As soon as I

This morning President-elect Barack Obama reaffirmed his strong commitment to health care reform. The United States Breastfeeding Committee (USBC) believes that breastfeeding is an "essential public health issue" and should be a high priority for the incoming administration. In light of this, the USBC has created a petition urging President-elect Obama to make breastfeeding a high priority.

Over at BlogHers Act Canada, we usually focus on two broad sets of issues: the environment and family health. This week, one of our writers opened up a discussion on something that has nothing to do with saving trees or cutting carbon emissions, and that is only tangentially related to health, but something that nonetheless demanded attention for the simple reason that we're women. And for women, the issue of hatred directed violently toward women always deserves and demands our attention.

Recently a group of bloggers who had participated in the San Francisco Food Bank's Hunger Challenge gathered to share what we learned from living on a $3 a day food budget for a week.

Yesterday was - how do I say this without risking profound understatement?

The other week, when John McCain got all dismissive about women's health during the presidential debate and kept waving his fingers around making sarcastic air quotes - or, as Jon Stewart correctly referred to them last night on The Daily Show, "dick fingers" - I thought that my head was going blow off. "Women" use "health" as an excuse to get abortions? This is something that the "extreme pro-abortion movement" uses as a ploy to promote abortion? "HEALTH"?