By Teagan Rowe
After many a “girl chat” with friends, family and peers, it’s come to my attention that many women don’t have a confident understanding of the science behind contraception and the female body as a whole. This issue is now resulting in popular myths and incorrect information circulating, with some women even refusing contraception entirely.
In my own experiences, I have witnessed my friends and peers end up with an unwanted pregnancy because they don’t understand the importance of protection.
I know girls who unknowingly stay on birth control that is wrong for them, resulting in irregular bleeding, ongoing mood changes, and physical pain and discomfort.
I have personally dealt with and witnessed the ongoing frustration of visiting general practitioners for months on end and receiving no solution about my pain.
The lack of information around women’s health leaves not just my friends and colleagues but women around Australia with unnatural pain and no explanation.
This column, ’What She Doesn’t Know’, will touch on the conversations that were never had throughout your childhood and teenage years about the female body and the sometimes wonderful, sometimes horrible, things we experience on a daily basis.
This column will discuss the intricacies of the contraceptive pill, how it works, and the do’s and don’ts. It will touch on the difference between contraceptive methods, as what works for others might not work for you. And it will help navigate very real and serious topics such as endometriosis, toxic shock, PCOS (now known as PMOS), and more.
While this isn’t a complete personalized guide that should be taken as gospel (because everybody is different), it is a more in depth and easily digestible explanation that applies to all uterus owners in the hopes of making women feel more comfortable and knowledgeable about their bodies and potentially eradicating the ongoing inaccessibility to information about women’s health.
This historically widespread issue has been affecting women for generations, and some now carry this lack of education well into adulthood.
Natural menopause occurs on average between the ages of 45 to 55, meaning the lack of knowledge about women’s bodies doesn’t just stop at the age of twenty.
Wesfarmers, a beauty and health company operating in retail, pharmaceutical, and digital health industries identified patterns in the research conducted by Priceline Pharmacy about Australian women’s knowledge of menopause and perimenopause.
They found that:
Two in five (40%) women say they lack confidence around menopause, with 11% feeling no confidence whatsoever.
One in six (17%) Australians can’t name a single menopause symptom.
While this column won’t specifically touch on menopause, these findings are a direct representation of just how many women don’t fully understand their own bodies.
The University of Utah Health states that the reason for the ongoing inaccessibility of information to women’s health is due to the historical assumption that the male body is “normal”, whilst the female body is atypical. Consequently, most medical researchers refrained from testing on female subjects altogether. This meant research on female test subjects like mice became common.
Due to policy and social changes that occurred in the 1990s, the testing of female subjects has become increasingly more common, and female representation within the medical industry has grown significantly.
However, this remains an issue because of the decades of medical research before this, with many medical practitioners relying on dated information when it comes to women’s health, often diagnosing endo symptoms as “a bad period” and prescribing only paracetamol to relieve the pain.
As a patient, it is also apparent that it’s not only women who don’t have the proper education about their bodies, but many medical general practitioners.
I spoke with the QUT Guild’s Women’s Officer Keely McConnell to understand her experiences with the lack of accessible information on women’s health.
“In my professional role as Women’s Officer, I get lots of students asking for educational resources, particularly students from regional towns, or international students that didn’t receive adequate information on women’s health during their school years.”
McConnell said the biggest gaps in the information students can access about women’s health are contraception, and female anatomy in general.
“Many people don’t know when pain is “normal” and when it isn’t. With a better understanding of things like endo and PCOS in the medical industry, it’s important to have these conversations and know what’s happening to your body.”
The QUT Guild and McConnell herself are involved in educational outlets to help students understand more about their health.
“The organisation is called True; they do a lot of different things around reproductive health. They have clinics where students can get STI checks and things like that, but they also provide education and their education level ranges from prep all the way to university. The organisation teaches things across all ages.”
“So far we have done 3 sessions over four weeks going over the very basics of sexual health, contraception, STIs, and everything about that.”
McConnell has just recently run a bra drive, making women’s undergarments more easily accessible to students.
“For students who have important questions about their bodies and don’t know where to go, there are sites such as Children by Choice and True that have the open and honest conversations about women’s health that needs to be addressed, as well as government sites such as Queensland Health.”
There are many organisations having the conversations about women’s health, healing the wounds caused by decades before. Now women are feeling more and more confident: if not in their own bodies, then to at least talk about it.
In this column ’What She Doesn’t Know’, I strive to contribute to that positive change, help women understand more about their bodies and to make them feel more confident, comfortable, and healthy.
