The subject line of the email sending me this article read “omg omg omg omg omg.” How else would one react to the following:  an Australian obstetrician/gynecologist, who performed countless surgeries on countless women over the course of his career, has been found to have botched many many surgeries — and to perhaps maliciously alter many more. In one case, a woman went into the hospital to have a small lesion on her labia removed. As she slipped into unconsciousness (from the anesthesia), he leaned over and whispered to her, “I’m going to take your clitoris too.” Sure enough, she woke up to the searing pain of genital mutilation. Because of her trauma and embarrassment, the woman didn’t speak up for two whole years. Because no one was checking credentials, neither this woman nor the countless others who visited Dr. Graeme Reeves, knew that he had been barred from practicing obstetrics in 1997 because he had refused to treat a woman’s puerperal fever. The woman later died. The medical board found that the doctor had “impaired mental capacity”. But he didn’t stop practicing, and he even lied his way into a job in 2002–the position in which he later mutilated Carolyn, the woman whose story is related above. There’s more:  

 Another woman went in for surgery on an ovarian lesion, and ended up with both ovaries, both Fallopian tubes removed; and a kidney gone, also, after complications ensued.

Another woman reports that Reeves failed to use gloves when performing a gynaecological examination, and used an “intimate, sexual” touch, as well as touching her breasts unexpectedly.

Another woman says that Reeves spent over an hour painfully attempting to insert an IUD after she had an abnormal Pap smear, saying “I haven’t got this right”. He performed no cervical biopsy, and she was later found to be riddled with cancer throughout her pelvis. 

So how did Dr. Reeves get this far? Why did more women not speak up?  And why, for the love of all that is holy, is Dr. Reeves’ medical malpractice insurance not covering care for Carolyn’s injuries? Like Hoyden (linked above), I’m going to say that this is a product of patriarchy at work. Hoyden writes:

This isn’t a borderline case, a known but unfortunate side effect, a medical slip: this is a seriously impaired doctor practising for many months in completely inappropriate ways, mutilating, and raping patients - and nobody around him, not his colleagues, not nurses or other staff, were able to stop him. Did they convince themselves that it “wasn’t that serious, really”? Did they convince themselves it was none of their business? Did they fear personal repercussions should they blow the whistle? Why did nobody so much as check his registration when he was employed? 

No one spoke up because women are told to feel shame about their bodies, and are made to feel like deviants for talking or thinking about their sexual and reproductive health. Carolyn waited two years (two years!) before speaking up about what Dr. Reeves did to her. And while I can’t for the life of me begin to explain why Reeves did this, I can’t help but think that it’s in some way connected to some sort of patriarchy-fueled desire to mark/own/control women’s bodies.What’s more, our society (this took place in Australia but is reflective of trends worldwide) continues to tsk-tsk men like this but not really to punish them. Dr. Reeves is not practicing any more, true, but he’s not in jail. Seems to me he’s much more dangerous than the average non-violent drug offender who finds him or her-self serving a long prison term, a victim of the US’s overly harsh drug laws. So now, 11 years after the first complaint was lodged about Reeves, he’s finally being held back from raping and injuring any more women (even if not by jail cell bars). But 11 years!? Makes me wonder if we’ve made much headway tackling subconscious misogyny and antipathy toward women’s sexual lives. 

So, I just got back from LSRJ’s killer National Leadership Retreat, Justice Doesn’t Just Happen. And let me say, it rocked. It was an important — and powerful — reminder that reproductive justice is not going to just fall in our laps. We’ve got to make it happen. And we can. Some suggestions for how:* An event educating your law school community about abstinence only, perhaps with a mock abstinence-only class.* A panel on the use of shackles on women who give birth while incarcerated (made easy with one of LSRJ’s easy events in an envelope).* For those of you who are alums, taking on a pro-bono case representing a young woman seeking a judicial bypass of a state parental notification requirement before she can get an abortion.And stay tuned in to this blog for more ideas and reactions, as well as exciting guest-posts from others in the LSRJ community.

Some days, I wonder whether certain prosecutors learned about a little thing called legislative intent when they were in law school. The reason I’m wondering this today is this: in Alabama, a prosecutor is charging a woman who is addicted to methamphetamine and who was unable to kick her addiction during her pregnancy with “chemical endangerment,” a new offense created in 2006 to protect children who live in homes where methamphetamine is produced. The law was envisioned as providing a tool with which to remove kids from homes where parents were producing meth.Operating on the theory that a fetus is a child, and paying no mind to the legislative intent motivating the law, the county prosecutor has used it to charge several women whose infants test positive for meth immediately after birth.  The prosecutor tries to sell the law as being about insuring maternal and fetal health:

 ”We are doing this for the sole purpose of trying to make sure both the mother and the child have a healthy pregnancy,” he said.  ”We’re not trying to throw these women in jail. That’s absolutely not the goal of it.” 

Putting aside for a moment the fact that he is in fact throwing women in jail, this statement is totally wrongheaded.  Expert after expert has asserted and article after article has shown that jailing pregnant women and new moms who struggle with addiction does not ensure healthy pregnancies — in fact, it has just the opposite effect.  Prosecutions like this one drive pregnant women away from seeking the prenatal care that is so vital to their health and that of their fetuses.  Feminist Law Profs has a laundry list of just some of the negative consequences of these prosecutions:

They deter women from getting drug treatment; they restrict reproductive freedom by incentivizing abortion; they are inevitably selectively enforced against the poor and minority; they remove the focus from the very real problem of lack of prenatal care for poor pregnant women; they take the attention off proven risks to fetuses such as fetal alcohol syndrome and tobacco use during pregnancy; they put hospitals and medical care providers in an adversarial relationship with their patients; they lead to absurd results, such as prosecuting women for not getting prenatal care or having a miscarriage; and so forth.

And yet, the prosecutions continue. Despite the fact that drug treatment programs are less expensive than incarceration and are more effective and ensuring healthy pregnancies and helping women get off drugs, treatment continues to be offered very little and funded even less. In some states, there is not a single drug treatment program that is aimed at or has space for a pregnant woman or mother and children. Given all these facts, the Alabama prosecutor’s pledge of purpose becomes even more laughable. The facts are out there to prove that his prosecutions are counterproductive. But at least the healthy child routine provides a good facade to mask the other, less socially acceptable, purposes of these prosecutions.  If this prosecutor (or the others out there pushing punishment on pregnant women and mothers) really cared about making sure pregnancies resulted in healthy births, they’d have halted the prosecutions yesterday.  

It’s no surprise that pregnant teens face unique challenges. As if finishing high school weren’t difficult enough for a pregnant woman or a young mother, some school districts count the days she misses before and just after birth as unexcused absences.  And then today there’s news, via Cara, that a Maryland school district has decided to inform parents whenever a student is is pregnant, regardless of the student’s wishes. This despite the fact that, under state law, teens have a right to make decisions about their reproductive lives independent of their parents. Not only that, but pregnant teens also have the penumbra of federal constitutional privacy rights that other women have too. What’s more, there’s broad agreement that the policy is bad for the health of both pregnant teens and their fetuses.  

Health experts say that students’ willingness to seek care will decline.“There’s no question this will have a chilling effect on kids coming forward,” said County Health Officer Peter Beilenson. “It’s going to slow down health care.”Howard’s policy “really pushes the issue of informing the parents, when state law says minors have the right to make decisions independent of the parents,” said Deborah Chilcoat, an education and training specialist for Planned Parenthood of Maryland and co-chair of a county coalition on adolescent sexuality and reproductive health. “It’s not going to be in the best interests of young people in Howard County,” she said.  

What’s the school district’s response to all this? Well, just that “parents have a right to know.” Implicit in that statement is the idea that the parents’ right trumps the young woman’s right…which in this context seems totally preposterous. Especially since, as Cara points out, the policy is also probably gender discriminatory:

The thing is that these girls are getting f—-d over on every count. You can bet that the school isn’t going to demand the name of the father, and then call his parents if that boy is a student. Because what boys do with their penises is almost always ultimately up to boys. And these pregnant teens aren’t exactly going to “get away” with not telling their parents, anyway.  

This policy is just another example (others include states’ prosecuting pregnant women who are addicted to drugs) of states, cities, and other governmental entities taking steps that are ostensibly to “protect” fetuses and women but that ultimately endanger them. These policies push women away from seeking pre-natal care, which has been proven time and again to be vitally important to maternal and fetal health. 

Apologies for the long hiatus in posting, everyone. Our website and blog have been undergoing the final stages of updating — the tail end of our rebranding and name change that took place this fall.  I’ll be back later today with a substantive post about the issues of the day and week.