“Better to go to the front three times than to give birth to a child once,” cried Euripides’ Medea. I’ve thought about that phrase many times in my life. As an adolescent and young adult with horror, as a woman who has given birth with glowing pride. You could say that I have now been to the front nine times. Actually, they should decorate me with honors, like a general.
Yet it is perverse that, 2,455 years after Medea, we still see pain as inherent to femininity.
A woman’s life simply means cold metal inside you, scraping, wires that we push through the cervix, contractions, cutting through layer after layer of skin to get to a child, culture, biopsy, blood, abused breasts, the ring of fire, tears , pulling and pushing. Preferably in silence, just persevere now, because everything else is weak or hysterical.
In de Volkskrant Last week there was an opinion piece by Alina Chakh and Eva de Goeij, two board members of the contraceptive interest group Ava, who denounced the medieval conditions surrounding the insertion of an IUD and asked for the normalization of serious pain relief when rooting around in uteruses, in the same way that men are neatly anesthetized. at a cut.
Numerous women followed who, based on their own experience, shared their story. Like modern Medea’s, equally furious and powerless, they try to impress upon us their suffering. But once again this temporary uproar does not make any difference.
Because women’s pain is fully accepted within our society. It often takes about seven years for the absolutely hellish condition endometriosis to be diagnosed in a patient. Until then, she is fobbed off with ‘just menstrual complaints’, ‘low pain threshold’ and ‘it’s between the ears’.
Every time a woman denounces the system surrounding physical suffering, we are confronted with paternalistic doctors, such as this time one Stefan van Rooijen, apparently a first-class misogynist, who on Instagram questions the expertise of Chakh and De Goeij and claims that Inserting an IUD in women who have given birth is not too bad, one paracetamol is enough. He should know.
We all know women’s defenses by now. Medical science originated around male bodies. When men had to have a copper piece placed into their scrotum through their urethra, we had long devised a friendly way to do this. Meanwhile, as you read this, a woman is lying on a treatment table crying in pain. A pain that can easily be prevented by anesthesia or local anesthesia.
I still sometimes can’t believe that simply by being born with a woman’s body, I have to deal with the fact that physical suffering is a given at all stages of my life. Next stop, somewhere around the menopause: the mammography. That too I will do, like a tame sheep, cursing inwardly, but outwardly the brave soldier.
The pride in the pain endured? Nothing more than a stockholm syndrome.
Sometimes I think: only when we free the woman’s body from the intense suffering she has to endure simply because she has breasts, a vagina, ovaries and a uterus, will real equality be able to take root in other areas as well.
Until then, it is not the man on the cross, but the woman crushing her breasts between glass plates, that we should hang in our churches.
“Better to go to the front three times than to give birth to a child once.” Let us remember that sentence, but only as a reproach, as an accusation, as a demand for humane treatment.
To share
Email the editor
