Remember how creepy and rapey this anti-Obamacare ad was?
Turns out, reality was just as creepy and rapey.
But the state of New York is actually trying to make things better.
Legislation introduced this month in Albany would make New York the sixth state in the nation to ban non-consensual pelvic exams at hospitals amid outcry that the procedure represents a violation of patients' rights.
According to multiple studies and reports, medical students in most states are allowed to enter an operating room under supervision while female patients are under anesthesia for other procedures, insert two fingers into their vaginas and place a hand on their abdomens to learn how to feel for abnormalities in the uteri and ovaries. Often, the women have no knowledge they are being subjected to the procedure and have never given prior consent.
Are you freakin' kidding me? I could be in the hospital for gall bladder surgery and there could be some medical student doing a non-consensual pelvic exam on me while I'm out? How could this possibly be an acceptable practice? Do they do non-consensual prostate exams on men?
It turns out that this has been a common practice at teaching hospitals from the beginning. After all, students need to learn, right? But as hospitals have moved away from being a purely teaching facility to being part of a group of hospitals, the practice has spread to all the hospitals in the group.Still, that doesn't really address how it has reduced actual human beings into practice dummies.
How hard would it be to just respect your female patients enough to allow them the choice to consent to these kind of exams? It's shocking how few states have banned this.
New York joins Hawaii, California, Illinois, Virginia and Oregon in banning non-consensual pelvic exams.
