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Photo credit: Photo by Flickr user epSos.de

Trying to avoid toxic chemicals? Take a survey of the different spaces you occupy every day. We’ve covered ways to reduce toxic chemicals in your home and in your office. Today we’re covering another common space: Your car. Try these tips to reduce toxic chemicals in your car, and make your school drop-off, work commute, or errand-run healthier and safer.

Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared at MyBrownBaby. -E.B.

It was a no-brainer for me: All the books said I should breastfeed my baby because it was best for her that she would be stronger, faster, smarter, better for it. And so I rushed out and bought myself a fancy Medella breast pump and stocked up on breast milk storage bags and got all giddy when I started filling out my nursing bras. (Um, yeah I was the president of the Itty Bitty Titty Committee and so the prospect of having boobies was a huge plus on my Reasons Why I Should Breastfeed list.) And I proudly told anyone who would listen that I planned to feed my child the natural way the way my mother’s generation and all the generations before hers did, too. The way God intended.

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in Ebony magazine. Many thanks to Dream Hampton for permission to re-publish. -E.B.

That the Latin definition of triumvirate translates literally into “of three men” hasn’t stopped my favorite triumvirate from being three Bessies: three very special sister-heroes who just happen to share the same name. I came to these women from very different directions, but they triangulate my ancestral altar in deeply personal and meaningful ways. For Black History Month, I’ll share “my” Bessies.

by Rachel Lincoln Sarnoff
Executive Director/CEO
Healthy Child Healthy World
www.healthychild.org

Last week’s findings of arsenic in organic brown rice syrup may be even more frightening to parents than last year’s discovery of the cancer-causing substance in apple juice. That’s because organic brown rice syrup is ubiquitous in natural products—it’s used as a substitute for high fructose corn syrup.

MNN reported on the Dartmouth study, which found concentrations of arsenic of 23 to 128 parts per billion (ppb)—12 times the Environmental Protection Agency’s safe drinking water limit of 10 ppb—in some cereal bars containing rice. (The EPA has not set safety levels for arsenic in food.)

In the 1970s, after it became illegal to discriminate based on race, some employers responded by imposing high school education requirements for blue-collar jobs. Today, employers who want to keep women out of “men’s jobs” do something similar: they wait until workers get pregnant, and then deny them “light duty,” like desk work for a police officer, for example, or a transfer from the warehouse to the phone bank, making them unable to perform their jobs.

Sex, freedom, religion, women’s rights, motherhood, birth control, and politics.

It’s a volatile mix.

And right now there’s a growing drumbeat of attacks on universal access to full coverage for crucial contraceptive health care that cannot be ignored: