Here on BlogHer we have lots of discussions of the pressures women are under. Some of it from the the outside, and a lot of it from the inside. It's amazing the hoops we ask ourselves to jump through, leaving aside the pressures from our families, our employers, media messages, and the infamous "they". As in "they say".

Every year, Planned Parenthood offers services to more than five million men, women, and adolescents. In that year, they offer nearly one million Pap tests and more than 850,000 breast exams, provide provides more than 3.3 million tests and treatments for sexually transmitted infections, and estimate that their services prevent as many as 621,000 unintended pregnancies. Many locations offer prenatal and postpartum care. In addition, they offer safe, affordable abortions.

You have to look out for the flu, do you hear me? You, and everyone you know. That may or may not mean getting a flu shot - more on that below - but either way, watch for it, cover your mouth, wash your hands, see the doctor... do whatever it takes to contain it. Especially if you are pregnant, or know someone pregnant, or might possibly one of these days sneeze on someone who is pregnant. Because those someones? Their lives - and the lives of their babies - depend on it.

One of my co-workers was looking into convertible car seats the other day. She asked me my opinion about car seats, and boy, was she in for it. My daughter, who's now a svelte five-year-old, was such a large baby that she grew out of her carrying-case car seat (you know, the infant kind you lug around, giving yourself permanent back pain?) when she was four months old. You heard me right.

A 9-year-old mind in an adult's body: Can she raise a child? A legal battle in India over the rights of a mentally challenged woman who had been raped in a government-run home for destitute women and is now pregnant, has torn the nation. Does a 19-year-old with the IQ of a nine-year-old have the right or the ability to make a decision about her unborn child conceived through rape? Can rights come without responsibilities?

Washington Post columnist, Alan Goldenbach, wrote a moving piece this week in the newspaper about the death of his son in-utero and society's inability to discuss stillbirth and neonatal death. What wasn't quite so moving were some of the comments that came as a response to the article. The believed anonymity of the Internet brings out cruelty. It isn't anything the average person experiencing a loss hasn't heard before:

I had an addiction. I freely admit that now. It was an addiction that lasted throughout the entirety of my first pregnancy and for most of the first year of my daughter's life. It was an addiction that I could not shake, even though I had moments of clarity when I knew that the object of my addiction was not good for me. Because even though I knew that it wasn't good for me, knew that it undermined me, knew that it kept me in a state of panic, I really believed that I couldn't go on without it.

You may know Kristy Sammis from She Just Walks Around With It as BlogHer's own former Events Manager. For those of you who only know Kristy as our Events manager, and not as a life blogger, you have been missing out! And we are thrilled to introduce you to her comic stylings via this week's BlogHer of the Week post, Making It Work for Me and My Pelvix.

I'm not the only one who thinks that David Letterman owes us all an apology. But it seems like there are only a few of us.

As the April Rose hoax unfolded last week and anger and grief unfurled itself from the readers of her defunct blog, this energy has been festering in blog posts and exchanged emails with the question about what to do with the tidal wave of emotions. And my advice is to redirect it.

Since it's Baby Week on Discovery Health I thought I would do a little blog round-up on pregnancy nutrition. As much as I would love to claim that I had great eating habits during my pregnancies (16 & 19 years ago), I have to admit that I made my share of pregnancy nutrition fopauxs. For example...I didn't drink even one glass of milk (I hate milk), and I gained over forty pounds each pregnancy. But enough about me, here are some posts by women trying to get it right.

On Thursday the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the first flu pandemic in 41 years. But there is no need to panic, the H1N1 virus (swine flu) has not become any more lethal, it's just being recognized as a pandemic now because of the numbers of cases and areas affected. From The Wall Street Journal - Flu Pandemic Is Declared...