to be a woman, is to be neglected.
whose pain is worthy of soothing?
If female pain was taken seriously, we’d live a different world.
That’s what kept coming to mind, as I read through all your courageous shares under my post about doctors inserting IUDs without anesthesia. Many of you opened up about a range of traumatic experiences with reproductive healthcare and the pain you’ve simply been expected to take as a woman, because you’re a woman. The fact that women are presumed to be able to undergo IUD insertion or removal without any sedation, when equally as invasive procedures like tooth removal or colonoscopies almost always come with it, tells us a lot about our collective apathy for female suffering. I was shocked to find out this is the norm because providers tend to underestimate just how excruciating the procedure is for women.
But at the same time, it should come to no surprise that our suffering isn’t taken seriously, when the father of gynecology Dr. James Marion Sims collected information about women’s bodies by conducting horror experiments on enslaved Black women without anesthesia. According to reports, the women were “screaming and crying, while a team of physicians stood nearby observing and learning.” It’s a haunting realization: our most basic knowledge about female bodies, came from a man who abused them.
Even the opioid crisis, has shown us the discrepancies between whose pain is seen as worthy of soothing. Some believe it’s an issue that disproportionately impacts white people simply because they are prescribed more painkillers than other populations. For instance, African-Americans are 34% less likely to be offered opioids by their doctor. And while women are less likely than men to be treated for their pain, women get treated differently. One study by researchers at the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, found that Black and Hispanic pregnant women are more likely to report higher levels of pain than white women, but less likely to receive pain management medication for it. Black women are also less likely to be diagnosed with endometriosis when they report the same symptoms as their white counterparts.