More Than Breasts and Babies

If you based your image of the female body on the literature about women's health, you'd come away thinking that the entire female body consists of breasts, uterus, cervix, vagina, and nothing else. Over and over, in research and advocacy efforts, women's health is treated as a reproductive issue. Women's health gets turned into maternal and child health, or reproductive health.

It's true that pregnancy and childbirth are some of the most risky times of a woman's life. But they're not the whole of a woman's life. It's insulting to focus on those experiences at the expense of everything else, and it's bad science to boot.

Women get cancer, and not just cancer of their breasts, cervixes, or ovaries. They get leukemia, lymphoma, malignant melanoma, brain tumors.  They get osteoporosis at disproportionately high rates. They have heart attacks, and they respond to cardiac medicines differently than men do. They catch malaria even when not pregnant. Women face domestic violence, greater rates of poverty, and lack political representation. They lack opportunities for employment and education.  In some parts of the world, they're not even allowed to leave the house.

In the face of all this, we focus only on the parts we care about, as though the entire field of health is a group of hormonal teenage boys with the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue under the bed. We focus our health concerns on sexy parts like breasts and labia, and mommy parts like the cervix and the uterus. Genital mutilation is a horror, but it's not the biggest problem facing women. Neither is breast cancer, or for that matter, maternal mortality.

It's time to grow up, and treat women like human beings with more than four body parts.

(image credit: Marylin Shaikh)