Veterans Affairs Centers Fall Short of Women's Needs

The VA's motto is to "care for him who shall have borne the battle," and it is painfully clear that they still mean that literally. Women, who now comprise roughly 14% of our Armed Forces, are fighting in almost all of the aspects of the current wars, and are returning with the scars, visible and not, to prove it. These scars need treatment and care, but, unfortunately, Veterans Affairs Centers are ill-equipped to handle the specific needs of female veterans.

A recent investigation found that one-third of VA centers lack proper facilities for conducting pelvic exams or for the mental health care that women veterans need. I remember having to hunt around for a toilet in an ill-fitting paper gown at my own exit screening, past several other open, occupied exam rooms. I was the only woman there. They had no sanitary napkin to offer me and it was an embarrassing scene trying to find a place where I could insert a tampon. I was fighting back tears when I finally found a (presumably) unisex bathroom.

One of the fastest growing demographics in the military, women are also reporting symptoms of PTSD in record numbers. Another female veteran, who suffers from PTSD and has attempted suicide multiple times, blogs on Daily Kos that her symptoms and condition were repeatedly triggered by health professionals who could have avoided harm to her by simply reading her record -- the same record, she points out, they had to open to call her. She was placed into group therapy with men who abused their spouses or committed sexual assault, which seems ludicrous, given that we know that women are more likely to be abused by those with whom they serve than harmed by enemy fire. How is putting a woman in same room with someone who looks just like her assailant therapy?

Even when the VA boasts that it has several centers prepared to deal with the needs of women veterans, I have to ask: how accessible are those centers? Only eleven centers in the whole country serve homeless women vets and their children, which doesn't scream accessibility when a woman is wondering where her kids are going to sleep or how she is going to feed them. As blogger ginmar notes in the Daily Kos link above, the VA won't always provide transportation to their centers, leaving it is up to the veteran to find her way there, often with the barriers of mental illness or stress conditions inhibiting her. Long travel can be taxing on a woman's resources and mean missed time from work (if she is able to work at all, depending on her condition), and it's hard to take public transportation when the subway station makes you fall to the floor, stricken with anxiety and panic, reliving the experience of Iraq.

You might say that I am angry at this lack of effort, but I am not. I am contemptuous. It isn't as if women suddenly showed up and wanted to play war. Women have been serving the War Effort for decades. While the VA reassures us that more facilities are being opened, these won't necessarily be specifically for women. They say that they are working on getting more comprehensive services for women, but are they going to fix the glaring deficiencies in current care practices?

We need better services for those who have served, and we need to be more proactive rather than reactive when it comes to the needs of the ever growing woman veteran population. Please contact the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs Chairman or your State Senator, and tell them that women veterans deserve better treatment than this.

photo: qnr on Flickr