Gertrude Pswarayi informs us that  "Menstruation Remains Taboo, Hinders Education Causes Health Problems" in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe.

BULAWAYO, ZIMBABWE — Growing up in the rural Chibi district of Masvingo in Zimbabwe, Tsitsi Moyo, 16, has never used a sanitary pad. She has never seen a tampon. Other sanitary wear such as keepers and moon cups, small internally worn, reusable, menstrual cups, too are luxuries beyond her reach.

Moyo, a short and pudgy-faced teenager has her own secret way to deal with her menstrual cycle — her old blue t-shirt. She cut it into pieces and rolls it into large strips, thick enough to blot blood and prevent it from dripping down her legs.

“I started my period when I was 10 years old,” she says, ashamed. “The country’s economy was crushing. I vividly remember my aunt going out to look for cotton wool from all supermarkets in town. After waiting for a long time, she returned empty handed. She went into her bedroom and returned holding several pieces of cloth from her pile of rags,” recalls Moyo.

Do you want to know the "Top 100 Blogs for Women" according to Forbes? Jill @ feministe gives us more details.

This is exciting: Feministe made Forbes’ list of the Top 100 Blogs for Women! We are all very excited. A big congratulations, too, to the other feminist blogs that made the list.

But of course the internet is a big place, and any list of 100 blogs is going to leave out a lot of great ones. So which sites that didn’t make the cut would go on your Top Blogs For Women list?

Alison Stevens tells us that "It’s Not Over: U.S. Women Still Die Giving Birth."

My mother survived childbirth dangers that would have killed her 100 years ago, giving me a keen appreciation for modern medicine. But an alarming number of U.S. women are still dying in an apparently anachronistic way. We need a U.S. action plan.

(WOMENSENEWS)–When I was a kid, my family and I used to make a parlor game out of the question, "What would life have been like if we had lived a century ago?"

It always made for an interesting game, so long as we skipped over the fact that most of us would not have made it into the world in those days.

That’s because my mother and sister most likely would have died in childbirth, preventing my brother from ever even being conceived. The only offspring with decent odds of existing was me, a girl who would have grown up without a mother or any siblings.

"Should We Worry That Women Are Not Having Babies?" Hello Ladies writes about a new report from Pew.

The news has been full of stories about women and babies this week. A report from the Pew Research Center, “Childlessness Up Among All Women; Down Among Women with Advanced Degrees”  states “Nearly one-in-five American women ends her childbearing years without having borne a child, compared with one-in-ten in the 1970s.” The research is based on the Current Population Survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau and looks at women between the ages of 40 and 44.

Other findings from the report:

-          The more education a woman has, the less likely she is to have children.

-          White women are more likely to be childless, or childfree, but the racial gap is closing.

-          The gap is also narrowing between the married and unmarried although the unmarried are more likely to be childless