However, the California Department of Finance predicts that the combination of demographic shifts and an increase in poverty rates will result in a steady increase in teen birth rates by 2008. This problem will be exacerbated by California’s budget challenges and the greater cuts to state funded family planning and reproductive health programs.
In other areas of preventive health, the tendency of economically disadvantaged women is to delay seeking treatment until there are signs of advanced stages of disease, which points to the need for early prevention efforts. Cardiovascular diseases (heart disease and strokes) are leading causes of death among California women. In 2001, nationally, 57 percent of African American women between 45 and 64 were diagnosed with hypertension, twice the rate for white women of the same age range. Hypertension is one of the leading causes of cardiovascular disease. Another key concern for adult women is improved access to screening programs for breast and cervical cancer. Statewide data from 2001 shows that while 79 percent of white and African American women over the age of 40 had received a mammogram in the previous two years, only about 70 percent of Latina, Asian, and American Indian women had. Specific subgroups have even greater discrepancies—for example, among Korean women 50 years or older in Santa Clara county in 2002, only 59 percent had had a mammogram in the previous two years.
Nonetheless, this represented a steady improvement in screenings among this population since 1994. At a statewide level, the relationship between women’s health and the environment did not emerge explicitly as a top concern.
However, a close look at the data from our listening sessions makes clear that in areas of the state where pollution is already causing chronic and life-threatening diseases, women feel that corporations and government officials should be held responsible for removing the threats from environmental pollution and cleaning up existing contamination.
In Fresno, for example, which carries the undistinguished moniker of the “asthma capital” of California, one in every six children has trouble breathing; this is three times the national rate. In some Los Angeles neighborhoods, like those in the Figueroa Corridor, 54 percent of the children under the age of six receiving services at a local clinic were found to have lead concentrations in their blood above the level demonstrated to cause disabilities. Participants in the state’s agricultural areas were particularly concerned about the need for increased community education about pesticide drift, a problem that occurs when agricultural pesticides are blown off course and contaminate nearby areas where there are workers, housing or schools.
