Your Body is Not an Outlier: The Voices of Women’s Reproductive Justice
The truth is, women’s reproductive health suffers serious neglect in the medical world. In 2023, only 8.8% of grants from the National Institutes for Health go towards women’s health research, despite women being 51% of the United States population. It can take up to 11 years for women to get an accurate endometriosis diagnosis. Even then, endometriosis and other gynecological conditions that affect up to 68 percent of women only have 33 research assets in the pipeline. There are five times more scientific studies done on erectile dysfunction than there are on premenstrual syndrome, even though about 90 percent of women experience PMS symptoms and only 19 percent of men experience ED.
Read those statistics again. Go ahead, let that sink in. These staggering facts make up the reality of women’s health today. The consequences of underfunded, non-holistic reproductive research is actively harming women of all ages on a day-to-day basis. So while men all over the U.S. reach for the Viagra they keep in their medicine cabinet, women are constantly suffering from undiagnosed or untreated conditions like PCOS, endometriosis, uterine fibroids, abnormal bleeding, and adenomyosis.
Furthermore, young women are not properly taught about their bodies. In most of the U.S., sex education amounts to a condom on a banana, preaching abstinence, and being shown a tampon with no real explanation of the menstrual cycle’s four phases. That is—if sex-ed is being taught at all. It is plainly absurd that women grow up in a world where they are not taught how their bodies work. To make matters worse, deep-rooted shame and taboos encircle sex-ed, resulting in a culture where women are not only uneducated but also uncomfortable in their own bodies.
To hear first-hand how these injustices actualize, I spoke with Avery Wilson, a third-year advertising student at the University of Oregon who has had first-hand experiences with the results of poor reproductive education. Avery, originally from Texas, said, “We barely even talked about birth control or women’s periods…I remember the first time I got my period I was really confused and I didn’t know what was going on.” She went on further to explain her disheartening experience with a Texas doctor because her cramping was so painful. “I was just told, like, okay, you’re going to bleed. They said nothing about other side effects. I have actually a pretty high pain tolerance, but I have really severe cramps and I need prescribed medication because [they] are so bad.” Ultimately, she concluded, “I wish that the doctor in Texas believed me because it would have saved me a lot of years [of pain].”
The minimization of menstrual pain is damaging women’s right to normalcy, too. I had the chance to sit down with Dr. Sarah Schraam, an OBGYN at the University of Oregon’s Student Health Center. She worked most of her life in obstetrics and loves that her job lets her see people through all stages of their lives. On the topic of menstrual pain, Dr. Schram remarked, “the degree to which women’s menstrual pain is just completely normalized and completely unaddressed and overlooked isn’t right…I see people all the time who have gone through their academic career, missing a day or two of school every month because of their pain. And that’s not okay. It’s also a not insignificant disadvantage to your academic career.” Her comment highlights just how clear it is that society has normalized intense period pain.
Unfortunately, dismissed pain isn’t the only factor to reproductive injustice. Women aren’t informed about their choices either. Avery Wilson shared that when she came to Oregon, she had a Nexaplanon arm implant and two different IUDS inserted within a very short span of time. She said, “Because of my lack of education in high school…it was basically trial and error on my body.” In the urgent political climate that we live in today, making these choices available and understandable is crucial. Current administrations are attempting to strip those choices away, and some women don’t even know they were there to begin with.
Even long before this administration, women were at a disadvantage. Reproductive health is vastly unresearched, but even the studies that do exist decenter women. Dr. Schram had more to say about this. When I asked her if sees evidence of the lack of reproductive research in her everyday work, she responded, “Yes, every day and all the time.” She continued by exclaiming, “We still don’t really understand PCOS. An enormous number of people experience at least somewhere on the spectrum of PCOS and endometriosis. There’s no way to diagnose endometriosis except for surgery. That’s craziness.” She also said the limited studies focusing on these conditions “exclude women who are pregnant, sometimes even women of childbearing age, or who are at risk for pregnancy. That means we exclude a really important part of the population.” Additionally, research in these few-and-far in-between labs is executed by men who aren’t including women in the research process. Historically, studies for the female reproductive system have been tested on male bodies, resulting in extreme methodological bias and underrepresentation of women in research. Lillian Harhay, a second-year human physiology major at University of Oregon, is particularly passionate about this subject. In an interview, she lamented, “What frustrates me the most is that we generalize healthcare for women…in reality, we have this entire section of healthcare that is just a blank slate, and we don’t seem to recognize that.” Women’s bodies are complex, and they should be treated that way through thoughtfully developed research. With that being said, Lillian shared that she is hopeful that there is an influx of young women who are inspired to “fill the void of information that leaves women just completely out of the story.”
Finally, the attitude surrounding reproductive education needs reframing. The amount of shame and hurt that results from stigmatizing reproductive health damages the way women view their bodies. If women were taught to be excited to learn about their anatomy, there would be less shame and taboo concerning sex-ed. Dr. Schram is confident that periods “don’t have to be this monthly curse…it could be reshaped through education at a young age.” The negative language that is associated with women’s bodies is a reflection of the education women receive. It’s time that women learn to love and understand how fascinating their bodies are!
Despite the discouraging realities of reproductive research, it is important to have hope for a progressive future. The rise of young women who want to devote their lives to supporting women’s health is remodeling the narrative of underepresentation. Women are learning integral information, and they are enthusiastic about extending this information to other young women.
As a healthcare provider, Dr. Schram has advice for women who are unsure how to advocate for their reproductive health in a medical setting: “Be clear about what you are bringing to the table…There’s a difference between being respectful and being deferential…It’s really important to say if something isn’t making sense to you.” Trusting what your body has to tell you equips you with agency in a field that doesn’t allocate women much of it. And care, care, care! It is the key to change. Enthusiasm must be persistent so the little girls of future generations have access to more information that allows them to love their bodies for the duration of their lives.
Sources:
https://www.foundationwomenshealth.org/why-we-need-fwh?utm_source=chatgpt.com
https://www.humanrightscareers.com/issues/essays-womens-reproductive-rights/
About the Author:
Hannah Dean is a sophomore majoring in English and minoring in dance at the University of Oregon. She is from the Big Island of Hawaii. She enjoys long conversations with her best friends, reading poetry she doesn’t understand, making bad photo art, camping, drinking ginger lemon honey tea, and laughing way too much while doing all those things. You can find Hannah on Instagram at @hannahh.deannn if you want to see her bad photo art or reach out and be best friends!