True story- I’m a physician. Did all my residency and fellowship training in NYC. The last fellowship I did was Integrative Medicine, so I’m at the big Integrative Healthcare Symposium that Beth Israel used to host at the Hilton on 57th south of Central Park. And I graduated medical school in 2000. There’s a woman who’s a psychiatrist maybe twenty years older than me. We shared a meal and she tells me how she went to medical school at Yale. She got to her OB rotation in medical school. And the first thing you do on your rotation is scrub in and hold the retractor. You can’t move or break sterile field. So she’s scrubbed in holding the retractor on the operating room table as a woman’s abdomen is opened for surgery and the senior attending walks in and inserts his erection in her backside. She can’t speak or move or break field. She stand still as a statue. And when the surgery is over she goes to her father’s friend who’s a physician to write her a letter saying she has back problems and can’t stand for long periods of time and she can’t scrub in and takes it to her Dean to get out of having to see this man again.
I can tell you stories forever of how horrible OB is. There was one particularly evil OB attending when I was on my OB rotation at Baptist East in Memphis. We were warned by other medical students this man liked to throw scalpels at medical students who were wearing surgical gloves and a scrubbed in to try and nick your gloves. Women have always been mistreated in medicine and never more than in obstetrics.
I have stories for days of the the horrible behaviors that these people get away with.
The one that blows my mind is Jessica Valenti breaking the story of how ACOG- the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology built a multimillion dollar facility in Dallas to conduct in person board exams and is requiring OB’s from states where abortion is legal to travel to Dallas and face the possibility of being dozed, assaulted, and murdered by anti abortion Christian fasc-holes. It’s unconscionable what AGOG is doing. Truly insane and callous. They don’t give ONE SHIT about these OB’s safety. Boards are a BS hoax that costs millions and millions to put on and lead to ZERO improvements in clinical outcomes or benefits to patients. Medical Boards are sexist racist conservative institutions who don’t support doctors or women. Look at what the Medical Board in Indiana did to the OB who’d helped a 10 year old who’d been raped her to Ohio to have an abortion.
I did a rotation at Harvard’s Boston’s Children’s in my Palliative Care fellowship. They let a 12 year old black boy die rather than get a heart transplant because he didn’t have a foster family. The month I was there I sank into a depression. Coming from NY it was unbelievable that this could happen but Boston is racist in a way NY never ever has been. And my friend from Med school who did Emergency Medicine at Mt Sinai kept explaining- The bigger the name, the bigger the assholes.
Ida, thank you for sharing. I’m a nurse-midwife, trained at UPenn, and over the twenty-five years of my career I can also share countless horror stories. And I know my colleagues have them too. The tolerance, moral injury, and numbing of those of us bearing witness to these horrors keep it going. Thanks for keeping the fire going.
Anushay Hossein has also written a book called The Pain Gap, which is an excellent survey of what’s going on in women’s health. It’s really difficult to read, and yet inspiring at the same time because it shows me that there are new people wanting to take up the cause and demand better.
I stopped practicing clinically in 2018, because after twenty years, I was completely burnt out. Being a champion of patient autonomy in this system comes at a great cost.
If we ever hope to stop this epidemic of mistreatment we need to keep speaking up, get more women in office, break down the patriarchy in our own unique and essential ways, and continue to demand more from our healthcare providers who are in serious need of trauma-informed healing themselves.
The hierarchy of organized medicine is keeping women from getting the care they deserve and breaking the people who are trying to change it. Amber, the podcast and your spotlight on it really help.
There is so much learned helplessness and ambivalence in sexual and reproductive healthcare. So many layers of misogyny, external and internalized, keep us right here. And then there’s the code of silence and protecting other clinicians. It’s worse than the cops. And more deadly.
Thank you for this piece and this discussion. Gratitude to you for your autonomy activism.
Thank you Suzanne. I feel like women who are working for reproductive rights share a sacred bond. The woman here in my town in Iowa City Francoise Gourronc who runs the ACLU of Iowa is this kindred spirit- that French spirit of resistance- and she’s meeting with the new Dean of the Medical School here in Iowa City who’s an OBGyn who has military background. There’s been an underground network of women helping women for all times. And that’s all we have is each other. My friend Catherine who lives in a Brownstone in Brooklyn in Clinton Hill by Suleika Jouhad and Jon Baptiste- Catherine’s brownstone turn of the century was a place where a midwife was arrested over and over for performing abortions. She’d get out and go back to work helping women. I gotta find the link to the story and I’ll send it to you. In solidarity and so glad you got out and are protecting your heart ♥️ Ida
So cool. Midwives were doing most of the abortions in those days and making a good living at it. A driving factor for making abortion illegal and midwifery almost extinct.
The story that captivates me is Black midwives who were measures of excellence birthing Black babies at home pre WW2 before obstetrics racistly misogynisticly violently stopped Black babies from being born to capable Black midwives by putting them out of business and making babies be born in hospitals. There’s a huge need for Black midwives to reclaim their place in birthing Black babies. I’m from the Farm and my mother is one of the Farm Midwives and my favorite story of Ina May Gaskin is in 2017 when Ina May was invited to the TX Birth Conference and Black midwife Tosha Sowels started the hashtag #InaAintShit when she gave some racist reply to Black maternal mortality being because Black women needed to pray more. Lol 🙃
I could tell Ina May horror stories from here to Kingdom Come.
I love how Moira Donegan just this June on Twitter explained-
Today I learned 2 things about The Farm, a commune in Tennessee where midwife Ina May Gaskin pioneered the “natural birth movement.”
1.) The Farm was founded in accordance with revelations Gaskin’s husband had while high on LSD.
It makes the world make sense as to why reproductive rights are absolutely gone in about half the country. We allowed white men who have such deeply internalized misogyny to drive the train for all these hundreds of years. Prince Will can’t be bothered to go cheer for the Lionesses.
Another example of just how rotten it’s always been- this white supremacist capitalist patriarchy we’re all swimming in... in my medical school class one of my classmates was Sean Allen who’s father was a dermatologist. Sean strutted around like the cat’s meow- arrogant and untouchable. But he also was kind to me- sent me to his father because my acne in Med school made my face look like a pizza- and his father was a perfect gentleman to me. Treated me, I never paid a dime, didn’t have a dime- then my last year- I’m doing an oncology rotation with Reed Baskin who’d gone to Med school with the elder Dr Allen back when MLK was assassinated in 1968- Reed tells me how their OB rotation was an absolute shit show. And when Lee Allen and Reed Baskin were Med students they were on their OB rotation together circa 1967 and Lee gets into a beef with a pregnant Black woman, and she’s in labor, on a gurney, and he jumped on the gurney, straddled her pregnant belly and was punching her in the face- as she’s actively in labor. Reed told me this story as if it were a joke- war stories of Med school in the 1960’s in Memphis. And it wreaked of white male violence against Black women. But no one ever had called Lee out for this. There were zero consequences for him for assaulting this Black woman in labor. It reminds me of this story of Sally Hemings who was held captive in a windowless chamber for years to be raped by Thomas Jefferson. And when one of her sons was able to speak as a statesman many years later- he explained there is no such thing as a good slave owner. That’s a complete lie we’ve been spoon fed forever. So the violence upon which this country was founded is where we are now. As ye sow so shall ye reap. We’re reaping the seeds of violence and subjugation. That’s all this country has ever known.
So disturbing and once again (as with rape survivors) the victim is further victimized after reporting an incident, which is why IMO so many never report and the cycle of abuse continues. I've heard IVF is very expensive and wonder if the "local" was offered as a less expensive option to anesthesia in these cases or if every retrieval procedure at this Yale clinic was an opportunity for abuse by this nurse/addict? Thank you for once again using your voice to raise awareness. 💙
I wish this was surprising. But I'm not surprised at all. Womens' pain being dismissed.
When I went into labor with my son in 2019, the male OBGYN told me there was no way I was in labor because I wasn't in enough pain. I was bleeding and concerned about it. He had a nurse come in, kick my husband out of the room and ask me if I was having an affair because that was the only explanation for my bleeding.
True story- I’m a physician. Did all my residency and fellowship training in NYC. The last fellowship I did was Integrative Medicine, so I’m at the big Integrative Healthcare Symposium that Beth Israel used to host at the Hilton on 57th south of Central Park. And I graduated medical school in 2000. There’s a woman who’s a psychiatrist maybe twenty years older than me. We shared a meal and she tells me how she went to medical school at Yale. She got to her OB rotation in medical school. And the first thing you do on your rotation is scrub in and hold the retractor. You can’t move or break sterile field. So she’s scrubbed in holding the retractor on the operating room table as a woman’s abdomen is opened for surgery and the senior attending walks in and inserts his erection in her backside. She can’t speak or move or break field. She stand still as a statue. And when the surgery is over she goes to her father’s friend who’s a physician to write her a letter saying she has back problems and can’t stand for long periods of time and she can’t scrub in and takes it to her Dean to get out of having to see this man again.
I can tell you stories forever of how horrible OB is. There was one particularly evil OB attending when I was on my OB rotation at Baptist East in Memphis. We were warned by other medical students this man liked to throw scalpels at medical students who were wearing surgical gloves and a scrubbed in to try and nick your gloves. Women have always been mistreated in medicine and never more than in obstetrics.
I have stories for days of the the horrible behaviors that these people get away with.
The one that blows my mind is Jessica Valenti breaking the story of how ACOG- the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology built a multimillion dollar facility in Dallas to conduct in person board exams and is requiring OB’s from states where abortion is legal to travel to Dallas and face the possibility of being dozed, assaulted, and murdered by anti abortion Christian fasc-holes. It’s unconscionable what AGOG is doing. Truly insane and callous. They don’t give ONE SHIT about these OB’s safety. Boards are a BS hoax that costs millions and millions to put on and lead to ZERO improvements in clinical outcomes or benefits to patients. Medical Boards are sexist racist conservative institutions who don’t support doctors or women. Look at what the Medical Board in Indiana did to the OB who’d helped a 10 year old who’d been raped her to Ohio to have an abortion.
I did a rotation at Harvard’s Boston’s Children’s in my Palliative Care fellowship. They let a 12 year old black boy die rather than get a heart transplant because he didn’t have a foster family. The month I was there I sank into a depression. Coming from NY it was unbelievable that this could happen but Boston is racist in a way NY never ever has been. And my friend from Med school who did Emergency Medicine at Mt Sinai kept explaining- The bigger the name, the bigger the assholes.
It’s not at all surprising this happened at Yale.
Wow. Thank you for this powerful insight Ida.
Ida, thank you for sharing. I’m a nurse-midwife, trained at UPenn, and over the twenty-five years of my career I can also share countless horror stories. And I know my colleagues have them too. The tolerance, moral injury, and numbing of those of us bearing witness to these horrors keep it going. Thanks for keeping the fire going.
Anushay Hossein has also written a book called The Pain Gap, which is an excellent survey of what’s going on in women’s health. It’s really difficult to read, and yet inspiring at the same time because it shows me that there are new people wanting to take up the cause and demand better.
I stopped practicing clinically in 2018, because after twenty years, I was completely burnt out. Being a champion of patient autonomy in this system comes at a great cost.
If we ever hope to stop this epidemic of mistreatment we need to keep speaking up, get more women in office, break down the patriarchy in our own unique and essential ways, and continue to demand more from our healthcare providers who are in serious need of trauma-informed healing themselves.
The hierarchy of organized medicine is keeping women from getting the care they deserve and breaking the people who are trying to change it. Amber, the podcast and your spotlight on it really help.
There is so much learned helplessness and ambivalence in sexual and reproductive healthcare. So many layers of misogyny, external and internalized, keep us right here. And then there’s the code of silence and protecting other clinicians. It’s worse than the cops. And more deadly.
Thank you for this piece and this discussion. Gratitude to you for your autonomy activism.
Thank you Suzanne. I feel like women who are working for reproductive rights share a sacred bond. The woman here in my town in Iowa City Francoise Gourronc who runs the ACLU of Iowa is this kindred spirit- that French spirit of resistance- and she’s meeting with the new Dean of the Medical School here in Iowa City who’s an OBGyn who has military background. There’s been an underground network of women helping women for all times. And that’s all we have is each other. My friend Catherine who lives in a Brownstone in Brooklyn in Clinton Hill by Suleika Jouhad and Jon Baptiste- Catherine’s brownstone turn of the century was a place where a midwife was arrested over and over for performing abortions. She’d get out and go back to work helping women. I gotta find the link to the story and I’ll send it to you. In solidarity and so glad you got out and are protecting your heart ♥️ Ida
Is it Madame Restell? That’s an amazing story with a tragic ending.
It’s Mildred Miller! https://www.brownstoner.com/architecture/building-of-the-day-578-584-washington-avenue/
So cool. Midwives were doing most of the abortions in those days and making a good living at it. A driving factor for making abortion illegal and midwifery almost extinct.
The story that captivates me is Black midwives who were measures of excellence birthing Black babies at home pre WW2 before obstetrics racistly misogynisticly violently stopped Black babies from being born to capable Black midwives by putting them out of business and making babies be born in hospitals. There’s a huge need for Black midwives to reclaim their place in birthing Black babies. I’m from the Farm and my mother is one of the Farm Midwives and my favorite story of Ina May Gaskin is in 2017 when Ina May was invited to the TX Birth Conference and Black midwife Tosha Sowels started the hashtag #InaAintShit when she gave some racist reply to Black maternal mortality being because Black women needed to pray more. Lol 🙃
I could tell Ina May horror stories from here to Kingdom Come.
I love how Moira Donegan just this June on Twitter explained-
Today I learned 2 things about The Farm, a commune in Tennessee where midwife Ina May Gaskin pioneered the “natural birth movement.”
1.) The Farm was founded in accordance with revelations Gaskin’s husband had while high on LSD.
2.) They prohibited abortion and birth control.
I read this twice because it's so horrifying that I couldn't wrap my brain around it the first time. Oh my gosh. 💔
It makes the world make sense as to why reproductive rights are absolutely gone in about half the country. We allowed white men who have such deeply internalized misogyny to drive the train for all these hundreds of years. Prince Will can’t be bothered to go cheer for the Lionesses.
Another example of just how rotten it’s always been- this white supremacist capitalist patriarchy we’re all swimming in... in my medical school class one of my classmates was Sean Allen who’s father was a dermatologist. Sean strutted around like the cat’s meow- arrogant and untouchable. But he also was kind to me- sent me to his father because my acne in Med school made my face look like a pizza- and his father was a perfect gentleman to me. Treated me, I never paid a dime, didn’t have a dime- then my last year- I’m doing an oncology rotation with Reed Baskin who’d gone to Med school with the elder Dr Allen back when MLK was assassinated in 1968- Reed tells me how their OB rotation was an absolute shit show. And when Lee Allen and Reed Baskin were Med students they were on their OB rotation together circa 1967 and Lee gets into a beef with a pregnant Black woman, and she’s in labor, on a gurney, and he jumped on the gurney, straddled her pregnant belly and was punching her in the face- as she’s actively in labor. Reed told me this story as if it were a joke- war stories of Med school in the 1960’s in Memphis. And it wreaked of white male violence against Black women. But no one ever had called Lee out for this. There were zero consequences for him for assaulting this Black woman in labor. It reminds me of this story of Sally Hemings who was held captive in a windowless chamber for years to be raped by Thomas Jefferson. And when one of her sons was able to speak as a statesman many years later- he explained there is no such thing as a good slave owner. That’s a complete lie we’ve been spoon fed forever. So the violence upon which this country was founded is where we are now. As ye sow so shall ye reap. We’re reaping the seeds of violence and subjugation. That’s all this country has ever known.
Thanks for sharing this 💔
Thank you so much for this story
Thanks for sharing!
Thank you for the awareness to this
So disturbing and once again (as with rape survivors) the victim is further victimized after reporting an incident, which is why IMO so many never report and the cycle of abuse continues. I've heard IVF is very expensive and wonder if the "local" was offered as a less expensive option to anesthesia in these cases or if every retrieval procedure at this Yale clinic was an opportunity for abuse by this nurse/addict? Thank you for once again using your voice to raise awareness. 💙
This is horrifying on so many different levels.
I wish this was surprising. But I'm not surprised at all. Womens' pain being dismissed.
When I went into labor with my son in 2019, the male OBGYN told me there was no way I was in labor because I wasn't in enough pain. I was bleeding and concerned about it. He had a nurse come in, kick my husband out of the room and ask me if I was having an affair because that was the only explanation for my bleeding.
Make it make sense?