The Pill, Puerto Rico And The Patriarchal Medical System | Letters

Your article connected contraception misinformation does not see nan agelong history of aesculapian misogyny (Online misinformation putting women disconnected contraceptive pill, study finds, 13 September). I americium a PhD interrogator studying nan taste sermon connected contraception. I’m besides a young female wrong nan property scope and online civilization that you talk about, and wrong my activity I research this abstraction critically.

Effectively, it is incorrect to presume a value-neutral inheritance erstwhile researching attitudes to contraception, a aesculapian exertion that is only disposable to us now done humanities injustices enacted upon women, particularly women of colour.

During nan improvement of nan pill, researchers coercively tested it connected women successful Puerto Rico, who were not informed of nan experimental quality of nan medicine. Despite galore of them reporting superior side-effects, nan researchers declared nan pill 100% effective, and dismissed nan patients’ symptoms arsenic psychosomatic, owed to nan “emotional super-activity of Puerto Rican women”. This rhetoric has unluckily endured crossed nan decades, pinch women’s reporting of existent side-effects routinely blamed connected “hysteria” or emotional suggestibility.

Birth power users coming are harnessing societal media to raise consciousness astir these issues, conscionable for illustration women’s wellness activists of erstwhile generations; and arsenic successful erstwhile generations, this has a inclination to see immoderate misinformation, since it operates extracurricular of rigorous research.

However, nan onus is connected aesculapian practitioners to create amended commencement power methods, alternatively than trying to quash concerns astir nan pill. A bequest of aesculapian gaslighting, trauma and unit runs through women’s medicine.
Rebecca Siddall
Cambridge