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Access to Health & Reproductive Justice
- Requiring lactation rooms to be made available at a number of City offices and service centers that serve members of the public, including DOHMH health centers, ACS borough offices, job centers, SNAP centers, and DSS medical assistance program centers. NYC is one of the first cities in the nation to provide this type of service, building on this administration's work to improve the health of women and children and promote gender equity.
- Donating 1 million condoms to Puerto Rico for Zika prevention efforts.
- Releasing a Guide on Pregnancy Protections in the workplace, housing, and public spaces.
- Increasing free access to feminine hygiene products for students, shelter residents, and inmates.
- Creating first-ever maternal mental health services through ThriveNYC, a mental health initiative led by First Lady Chirlane McCray – including free maternal depression screenings and treatment for all pregnant women and new mothers at twenty four hospitals citywide
- Creating of more family-friendly workplaces, including 9 New York City agencies with lactation rooms, and DOHMH assistance for individual mothers to negotiate lactation time/space at their workplace
- Making access to contraceptives and safe-sex education: women can now call 311 to find out where to get free or low-cost contraceptives in New York City. Teens can also search for where contraceptive methods are available online and via mobile app
- Providing education and support for mothers in Brooklyn on pregnancy, childbirth, parenting, breastfeeding, and healthy living through Healthy Start Brooklyn
- Offering doula support (emotional, physical and informational assistance with labor and delivery) for pregnant women and their partners through Healthy Start Brooklyn's By My Side Birth Support Program
- Training and empowering community members to support breastfeeding parents and families, while activating faith-based leaders, small businesses, policy makers and others in normalizing breastfeeding for all families through the Brooklyn Breastfeeding Empowerment Zone
- Increasing access to comprehensive sexual education and quality reproductive health care and contraception to students through School-based Health Centers and Connecting Adolescents to Comprehensive Health Care (CATCH)
- Protecting girls and young women from unintended pregnancy through New York City Teens Connection—the City's largest teen pregnancy prevention initiative in the Bronx, Central Brooklyn and the North Shore of Staten Island that works with partners to provide evidence-based programming and linkages to quality care in high schools, colleges, clinics, foster care agencies and youth-serving organizations
- Engaging hospital systems to adopt best practices in family planning in primary care, post-abortion and postpartum settings as a way to address unintended pregnancy though the Quality Improvement Network to Access Contraception (QINCA)
- Offering home visits to families with infants, including those living in homeless shelters, to facilitate the adjustment to parenthood, assure a safe living environment for families, provide topic-specific education, and identify health and social issues that require referral to community-based services through the Newborn Home Visiting Program
- Offering home visits from nurses to provide education, support and guidance for qualifying first-time mothers through the Nurse Family Partnership
- Supporting maternity facilities to achieve Baby-Friendly designation, which recognizes facilities that provide an optimal level of care for infant feeding and mother/baby bonding, through the New York City Breastfeeding Hospital Collaborative
- Protecting transgender New Yorkers by implementing a regulation change to remove barriers to changing the gender marker on New York City birth certificates