2023-05-05 04:50:59
Those who don’t want children shouldn’t be sexually active, he tells me. It is the only way to avoid pregnancy without interfering with the function of the internal genital organs. Once again, the protagonists are the organs. Not the woman. And autonomy is something that is not even included in this reflection… I can only imagine the dialogue that must take place in the privacy of your care box: “Doctor, I come here because I am sexually active and I don’t want to get pregnant”, “then become sexually inactive ”. Flower.
“What you do is not medicine,” a colleague tells me. “It has to do with this of the rights of women, of diversities. But it is not medicine. Medicine is about healing diseased organs, saving lives. Nothing to do with sexual rights.” I look at him. He is a man. He is old. Maybe he’s not really that old, but he is old.
I know that it is a dialogue that I am not going to follow and therefore I limit myself to looking at it. And he keeps talking. I look at him with patience, indifference and pity. Patience, because I have trained it. Indifference, because it is the way I have found to replace anger and not respond to provocations. And it’s a pity because… How many things in life and the profession is this man missing? Did the human being therefore forget to relieve the internal organs? How much humanity will he be leaving behind in his short human life?
Avoiding pregnancy involves interfering with the function of healthy ovaries and uterus, she tells me. That unwanted pregnancy increases the morbidity and mortality of the mother and that of her (her) children, particularly in adolescence, is a fact that she ignores or decides to ignore. That contraception is, together with penicillin, what has reduced the greatest number of deaths of mothers in Chile, is also left out of his monologue. What is relevant is the action of the uterus and ovaries, not the choice or health of the person who has those organs in the pelvis. A modern perpetuation of the fact of seeing women as a breeding animal.
Those who don’t want children shouldn’t be sexually active, he tells me. It is the only way to avoid pregnancy without interfering with the function of the internal genital organs. Once again, the protagonists are the organs. Not the woman. And autonomy is something that is not even included in this reflection… I can only imagine the dialogue that must take place in the privacy of your care box: “Doctor, I come here because I am sexually active and I don’t want to get pregnant”, “then become sexually inactive ”. Flower.
This sexual diversity thing is fashionable and it’s political, he tells me. I don’t think you’re wondering why in decades of professional practice you haven’t seen a single lesbian or bisexual patient. None. “Could it be that they don’t exist? Do not come to the gynecologist? Will they hide their sexual orientation when they meet me because they perceive something in me that makes them distrust? Questions that will never be answered, because they have never been done.
“Trans people live decades less than people who are not.” It’s my turn to speak. But I didn’t say it. It’s just that at this point I don’t want to listen anymore. I ran out of patience and indifference. I feel a little sorry for his limited thinking and what it implies in current medicine. For his zero empathy with anyone who thinks differently. And, above all, to know that he is not the only one. That there are so many, and so many. That the health debt with respect to women and diversity is far, far from being overcome.
Tomorrow will be another day. I hope to run into someone else over my mid-afternoon decaf.
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