Medical fallacies are another way to enervate women

There is a fine line between selfishness and just being reasonable. Hundreds of years of medical advancements and issues going hand-in-hand with close-minded people’s ethics has prepared many artifacts that are used to debate these medical fallacies regarding what women do with their bodies and who gets to influence what women ultimately decide.
This bold argument has actually been repeated since scientific terminology came into play in the medical field when people started boiling it down to whether or not women can have an abortion or not, yet amateurs and simpletons have made counterarguments, just continuously attempting to prove that their authority over medical choices is more important than the patients’ lives.
Even worse: doctors who are known to be saving lives everyday turn their attention towards a desperate woman in need of reassurance and then become disloyal and use outdated sources for their reasoning, much like an average person without a real doctorate would do when proven wrong. Even from a non-medically-interested viewpoint, women’s medical injustice is a monster of a scandal.
There are many ways organizations, medical facilities, brands, companies, and individuals have tried to let their voice about women’s medical injustice be heard, but to the close-minded, it has always been quiet and muffled.
In fact, The New England Journal of Medicine, a medical journal (that is deterrent of the close-minded) publishes thought-out medical cases, and has one very special article related to women’s medical injustice: “Reproductive (In)justice– Two Patients with Avoidable Poor Reproductive Outcomes” that dives deeper into the unfortunate world of hospital visits as a woman.
A promising group of authors- Kelly R. Knight, Ph.D., Laura G. Duncan, B.A., Marek Szilvasi, Ph.D., Ashish Premkumar, M.D., Margareta Matache, Ph.D., and Andrea Jackson, M.D.- who pieced the article together included two cases involving two women and following their medical journeys regarding their reproductive health, then summarizes the cases with a social analysis, notable clinical implications, and a follow-up. This article gives a great perspective to what happens behind the scenes of heroic actions in the medical world.
One of the cases that highlights how women can be easily taken advantage of in hospitals involves a Romani woman, Ms. J, in 1990 who was being sent to an operation room during labor and was told to sign an “antenatal form” that states that she would consent to a C-section and a hidden note that she would consent to sterilization. She wasn’t told what the form was about and signed it blindly because she was mostly concerned about the health of herself and her baby. With that reason in mind, it also was reported that the note about sterilization could’ve been added after she signed the form since it was in a different font. She was told about the sterilization after the operation but not in terms that a patient would understand. She only learned what exactly happened when she went for a follow-up visit.
The consequences made Ms. J worried about how she will be able to conceive another child in the future, and the blame was put all on her for signing the consent form and her husband left her because of his disappointment.
This case was thoroughly deconstructed so that researchers and the authors of the article could break down what was the reason for Ms. J’s tragic incident in a place that is supposed to feel safe. It was an act against Roma people, and the doctors who sterilized Ms. J was responsible for disrupting her reproductive health. This case defines reproductive injustice.
Reproductive justice, in the authors of the article’s words, “acknowledges and aims to address the relationship between disparities in reproductive health and the unequal treatment of women of color, substance-using women, and poor women. To improve health outcomes, clinical care and policy solutions must address structural racism, clinicians’ accountability for intentional harms, and access to treatments for opioid use disorder.”
This act of reproductive injustice against women of color, poor women, immigrants, and anyone in between just proves that the world is still unfair, and “Reproductive (In)justice — Two Patients with Avoidable Poor Reproductive Outcomes” has shown that very well.
The first clinical implication on the article states that “Using a reproductive-justice framework, educators can teach clinicians about the historical legacy and contemporary manifestations of eugenics and racism.” This can go the same way with education on women’s reproductive rights, resulting in a medical environment that can actually live up to its expectations: safe.
After researching a variety of different cases regarding women’s rights at hospitals, there is a recurring message that appears when you read between the lines: ignorance is very easily confused for being confident. This statement is fairly obvious and known, but when you connect it with doctors who are supposed to be life-savers, it’s concerning.
Whatever happens between a woman and her doctor can stay in the hospital, but the consequences from a close-minded medical professional’s sexism can follow a patient for the rest of their life.