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It turns out mom rage is a maternal mental health crisis that stems from a lack of good mother care. The U.S. is one of only a handful of nations that doesn’t offer paid family leave. Even surviving birth can be iffy in the U.S., which has the highest maternal mortality rate of all industrialized nations. (Minna Dubin, 9/21)

I have devoted my life to vaccine science. During the pandemic, our team at the Texas Children’s Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine developed a low-cost COVID vaccine that was scaled for production in India and Indonesia, where almost 100 million doses were administered. (Peter Hotez, 9/22)

For a parent, there are few things that can invoke more stress and worry than when their child is sick. Between fear of what may happen, figuring out where to seek care, and taking time off work, things get overwhelming quickly. This is stressful enough without having to also worry about how to pay for treatment. (Jeremy Jones, 9/22)

Nothing focuses the mind like visiting a ward where 24 infants with severe malaria are fighting for their lives. There is nothing like witnessing the silent desperation of a mother. No conversation has more impact than one with the overstretched doctors and nurses struggling to save these children's lives with insufficient beds, power outages, and rudimentary oxygen supplies. (Peter Sands, 9/21)

At the height of the pandemic, when everything was shut down, a patient with whom I had a long-term relationship developed suicidal ideation. A male adolescent who lived in poverty, he was not able to call me on his smartphone because he had run out of minutes. And he was ashamed to use his parents’ telephone because of privacy issues. Fortunately, he was able to find help. (Mark Goldstein, 9/22)

In March 2022, one of us, Kristina, was in Ukraine, running a training on a chilly day. Several hours into the training, one of the soldiers’ faces began to crumple, close to tears. The unit had just received a combat stress management skills training, including a box breathing exercise, in the field outside of a converted military base in Chernihiv near Ukraine’s borders with Belarus and Russia. The training involved discussing common acute stress responses, including the freeze response that can stupefy people, and how breathing exercises can support emotional regulation and return to function. The soldier said, “I wish I’d known how I could help in the past, when one of my friends was captured because he was frozen like that.” (Kristina Bohdanova, Marina Weiss and Samantha Weckesser, 9/22)

On Sunday, I participated in my first open water race, swimming to fundraise for cancer research as part of Swim Across America. I swam in honor of my mother, who died from breast cancer. (Leana S. Wen, 9/21)

In the last two years, surrogacy has gone from a $4 billion to a $14 billion dollar industry. This is a business that profits off eggs and wombs poached from impoverished women in the U.S. and places like war-torn Ukraine, where clinics have been described as "children factories" and babies were stuck in limbo for months, without parents, during the war. (Ericka Anderson, 9/21)