The Pew Hispanic Center has released a new fact sheet, Hispanic Women in the United States, 2007, containing statistics from the Current Population Survey and American Community Survey.

For a brief period, anyone who searched POPLINE using the search term “abortion” would get 0 results. Inquiries by concerned librarians revealed that POPLINE administrators at Johns Hopkins had made “abortion” a stop word after USAID, the reproductive health database’s funder, expressed concern about a few articles in the database. “Abortion” was quickly restored as a search term after numerous complaints.

For more, see articles at NPR and the Baltimore Sun.

The number of abortions performed in the US has fallen to the lowest number since 1976, according to statistics from the Guttmacher Institute (Washington Post). A report by Rachel K. Jones of the Guttmacher Institute is scheduled to appear in the March issue of Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, and a news release with a link to the study is available on the Guttmacher Web site.

Vietnamese families prefer boys over girls, and the sex ratio at birth is 110 boys for every 100 girls, according to a new UN report (AP). This imbalance could lead to increased violence against women, trafficking, and a “marriage squeeze” in a region where brides are already scarce, the report says.

Citation: Sex-Ratio Imbalance in Asia: Trends, Consequences and Policy Responses (2007). UNFPA.

Social Security provides benefits on a gender-neutral basis, but gender-related differences in work culture mean that in practice Social Security provides different levels of retirement security for men and women (Women and Social Security [PDF], American Academy of Actuaries issue brief).

The UN Millennium Development Goals Report 2007 (PDF) says that, halfway to the 2015 deadline, progress has been made toward the goals but there is still much work to be done.

A new Amnesty International report says that Zimbabwean women face abuse as they struggle to pay for food, schooling, and health care for their children in the country’s economic crisis (AP via Centre Daily Times).

The 2005/06 Zimbabwe Demographic and Health Survey is the first national survey to use population-based testing to determine HIV prevalence. The survey found that 1 in 6 adults in Zimbabwe has HIV. Other findings include that children’s health is worsening as vaccination rates drop and malnutrition and anemia increase. The final report is available from MEASURE DHS.

Postpartum Care: Levels and Determinants in Developing Countries, another new report from DHS, says that postpartum care is scarce in developing countries.

And in another DHS study, researchers found that women may be responsible for spreading more HIV within marriages than previously suspected (Economist.com).

According to a new report from the Guttmacher Institute, millions of women in developing countries have an unmet need for contraception and are thus at risk for unintended pregnancy. Progress has been made in many regions, but has been slow in sub-Saharan Africa, according to study authors.

The percentage of women over 40 who said they had a mammogram in the past 2 years declined from 2000 to 2005, according to a study published in Cancer (Reuters Health).