Medical providers at Catholic hospitals face multiple barriers to providing contraceptive care to women, and such restrictions have prompted workarounds that can be harmful to patients, a new report from the University of Chicago finds.

Every county courthouse in Illinois is now required to provide a publicly accessible space – other than a bathroom – for women to express breast milk. But a survey of 77 facilities finds that nearly 25% lack a designated lactation space. 

Each year, an average of 19 women in Chicago die within 12 months of pregnancy, according to a new report that identifies racial and socioeconomic disparities in mortality rates. “This is wake-up call to all of us and a call to action,” said a local health official.

Nearly 25 million American women living below the poverty line are faced with a terrible choice every month: whether to spend money on menstrual hygiene products or other necessities. We explore what’s called period poverty – and the movement to end it.

A new initiative called Family Connects Chicago will provide free home nursing services to families with newborns, offering “support that is so vital in those first few weeks of a baby’s life,” Mayor Lori Lightfoot said Tuesday.

Preterm birth rates have been increasing in Illinois since 2013, according to a new report from the nonprofit March of Dimes.

A federal judge on Wednesday struck down a new Trump administration rule that could open the way for more health care workers to refuse to participate in abortions or other procedures on moral or religious grounds.

After helping to reduce racial disparities in breast cancer deaths in Chicago, the local nonprofit Equal Hope is aiming to eliminate cervical cancer in the city. “No woman should ever die of cervical cancer,” said the group’s executive director.

Julia Wallace, the former managing editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, talks about women in journalism in her new book, “There’s No Crying in Newsrooms: What Women Have Learned About What It Takes to Lead.”

Planned Parenthood has quietly been building a new abortion clinic in Illinois, just across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, as women concerned about the uncertain future of Missouri’s sole abortion clinic flock across the state line.

For more than a decade, Northwestern University professor Celeste Watkins-Hayes documented the lives of more than 100 women living with HIV/AIDS in Chicago and beyond. Now, their stories are featured in a new book.

The new report illustrates that abortions are decreasing in all parts of the country, whether in Republican-controlled states seeking to restrict abortion access or in Democratic-run states protecting abortion rights. 

More than 200 of the world’s top female hockey players will play a series of tournaments as part of an effort to establish a single professional league with a sustainable economic model, featuring the world’s top talent, and pay a livable wage and include health care.

Planned Parenthood clinics in several states are charging new fees, tapping financial reserves, intensifying fundraising and warning of more unintended pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases after its decision to quit a $260 million federal family planning program in an abortion dispute with the Trump administration.

More women may benefit from gene testing for hereditary breast or ovarian cancer, especially if they’ve already survived cancer once, an influential health group recommended Tuesday.

Planned Parenthood said Monday it’s pulling out of the federal family planning program rather than abide by a new Trump administration rule prohibiting clinics from referring women for abortions.