Why all the hate on women’s health?

I’m hoppin’ mad about the state of women’s health care in this country right now.

Recently, a national task force has made recommendations made about mammograms in women over 40. Today, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) has made recommendations to increase the age of initial pap smears to 21 instead of 18 and to do them every other year rather than annually.

My first question: what’s with all of the recommendations about women’s health all of a sudden? Why is the general consensus that less preventative screening is better? To reduce women’s anxiety, as several articles on both subjects claim? Are you kidding me? Is this the Victorian era, where we need to be careful about the anxious tendencies in women and bouts of hysteria?

I’m calling bullshit on you, insurance industry.

Preventative medicine is expensive. Mammograms, pap smears – these annual exams cost the health care industry- and more importantly the insurance companies- a good chunk of change. So if a national task force makes a recommendation that no, your routine mammogram screening at 42 really isn’t necessary, then your health insurance company has more leverage to say, “Sure, you can get your mammogram. But we won’t cover it.”

What I find particularly concerning from ACOG about the new pap smear recommendations is that this greatly impacts younger women’s health. Women in the prime of their lives are being told to put on the earmuffs about their own reproductive health- essentially, “don’t worry about having pap smears annually b/c of false positives, because of stress” – at a time when women need to be the strongest advocates of their own reproductive health.

I’m concerned when recommendations on women’s health are being made on a national scale for women to simply “Don’t worry about it, b/c it might stress you out.”

Are false positives stressful? Yes. Can abnormal pap smears or mammograms result in unnecessary surgery? Yes. But would you rather run the risk that by not getting screened, you miss a cancer in its earliest stages, and thus, at its best treatable stage? Tell me about stress and anxiety then, National Task Force Making Recommendations About Mammograms that had *no* oncologists on it?

Also stressful: women who can’t afford to pay for those annual exams when their insurance denies their claim. FFS, there are people who’ve simply stopped taking their medicine altogether b/c they can’t afford it in this economy right now.

I will admit, there are a million things I wished I had learned about my own reproductive health as a teenager. I wish, instead of being scared into pregnancy by just holding my boyfriend’s hand, I was told about the realities and statistics surrounding conception. There’s only so much health class will get into, and saying that high school sex ed scratches the surface is being generous.

But at 18, I knew my first pap smear meant taking an active role in my sexual and reproductive health. In the last 9 years, I have learned that I need to be even MORE of an advocate for my own health, but annual exams at least kept my reproductive health on my radar. I’m so tired that women are told to “stop worrying, it’s all stress anyway” – when really, there are greater health issues hat are simply being ignored by lazy doctors.

(I realize there is a larger cultural issue with the fact that women talking about their hoohahs in groups, let alone in public, is generally taboo, that open, educational dialogues about sex, reproduction, and all things girlie bits are too gross or too shocking… but that’s a battle for another day.)

And don’t even get me started on the latest legislation in this country that intrudes on a couple’s privacy with regard to infertility treatment, including government mandated reporting of a woman’s every miscarriage. (Residents of Michigan: please advocate to overturn these bills in your state senate!)

If we don’t stand up for ourselves and for women’s health, who is going to do it for us? Certainly not national task forces or the insurance industry, that much is apparent, because making blanket recommendations that clearly favor that a woman’s stress level over her longevity is just irresponsible, and quite frankly, offensive.

I’ve shared this with women I care about in this note, women who have been their own advocates for their own health. I encourage you to share this with other similar women in your lives, or better yet, those that haven’t stood up for their own health rights.

We need to make our voices heard on these issues – they’re gambling with our lives, ladies, and I don’t like to see these kind of odds stacked against our sisters, mothers, and daughters. I invite you to raise your voice with me.