Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Iran is removed from the UN Commission on the Status of Women, the National Women's Soccer League was allegedly rife with abuse, and Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) takes steps to protect access to IVF. Have a lovely Thursday.
- Protecting parenthood. Sen. Tammy Duckworth's journey to parenthood took a decade. After she returned wounded from her service in Iraq, she spoke to her OB/GYN at her Veterans Affairs hospital about trying to have a child. She was referred to a fertility specialist, who came to the waiting room rather than meet with then-39-year-old Duckworth for an appointment. "She told me, 'You're too old. There's no way you could ever get pregnant through reproductive medicine. You just need to go home and enjoy your husband,'" Duckworth remembers.
"I believed her," she says now. It wasn't until five years later that Duckworth spoke to another doctor who told her about possible treatments—and found out her original specialist was part of a Catholic hospital. "I wasted five years because I was not given full information by a doctor at an institution that didn't support IVF because of religious grounds," the senator says.
