This is sign at a hospital in Brooklyn showing the direction of the Women’s Health Pavilion where many women willingly go in for routine pelvic exams. Yet, there are woman who have not asked for pelvic exams, and received them at various teaching hospitals around the country without their knowledge or consent.
It’s No Surprise
In 1951 scientists were able to grow live human cells in culture for the first time. This was an evolutionary tale that aided in medical advances such as developing a vaccine for polio, in vitro fertilization, cloning and gene mapping. HeLa cells, as they are called, are still being replicated to this day and is currently a billion-dollar industry. As invaluable as HeLa cells have become to medical research, they were taken from a poor black tobacco farmer without her knowledge.
Henrietta Lacks was being treated for cervical cancer in the “colored” ward at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, MD. A piece of her tumor was extracted from her cervix, without her consent, and used in an experiment to grow human cells in culture, something scientist all over the world had been trying to accomplish with no prior success. Lacks has been dead for almost 60 years and her own family did not know about the cells until about 20 years ago when scientist began interviewing her children to learn more about her germ line.
Rebecca Skloot wrote a book entitled “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” after spending a decade uncovering the story. In an interview with Smithsonian Magazine, she shares her thoughts surrounding what she hopes to teach through her book. “For scientists, one of the lessons is that there are human beings behind every biological sample used in the laboratory…The people behind those samples often have their own thoughts and feelings about what should happen to their tissues, but they’re usually left out of the equation.”
Click here to read full interview.
Medical Advancement Still Trumps Consent
In a recent New York Times article entitled “She Didn’t Want a Pelvic Exam. She Received One Anyway,” author Emma Goldberg uncovers a common and unsettling practice being performed by medical school students, pelvic exams on unconscious woman without their consent. Women being treated at teaching hospitals who under-go surgery are getting an extra service without their knowledge, a pelvic exam, simply for the purpose of teaching.
Some states, including New York, implemented a consent law just last year, meaning there are still several states in which this practice is still being taught. According to the article, medical faculty accept this as a necessary component of a physician’s training, outlining the benefits from practicing pelvic exams on patients under anesthesia is that the muscles are more relaxed and it makes it easier to feel the ovaries and uterus.
Pictured here is a speculum , which is the hard, metal tool, physicians use to perform pelvic exams.
Is this justifiable?
Pelvic exams are essential for women’s health. According to Mayo Clinic, they help to detect signs of ovarian cysts, sexually transmitted infections, uterine fibroids and early-stage cancer. An obstetrician-gynecologist at Emory University, Dr. Jennifer Goedken, shared with The New York Times that she hopes the legislative debates surrounding this story do not stigmatize the procedure, explaining the importance of students learning to recognize abnormalities and feeling comfortable performing the exam.
The pre-med advisor at York College, Dr. Andrew Criss, believes that any invasive medical procedure needs to have medical consent unless it is medically necessary. “Patients have a right to understand everything with a procedure,” he shared explaining there is no excuse, and this should become a law across the board. “Get it out there on the news, put pressure for a change, and spread the word.”
Women Are More Than Their Parts
Myrna Torres has worked in the health care industry for over two decades. “My initial thoughts were that this couldn’t possibly be happening in the 21st century in the most advanced country in the world,” she shared in an email interview. Her anger and dismay resonated through her responses. Torres ended the email with, “My thoughts on this topic are very strong and personally, I don’t think that anyone, for any reason, has a right, even for the pursuit of medical excellence, teaching or learning, to violate the rights and body of anyone without informed consent by the person who the procedure is being completed on.”
The A Word 