What is one supposed to do when the one who has been sworn in, to protect you, strips away from you your dignity and respect? When the one you thought would help, you when no one else can, betrays you?
Do you feel the sheer helplessness, when you cannot rely on anyone for you can trust no one? This seemingly haunting nightmare, of demons behind the mask of gods, is more realistic than you think. It is a story many women and girls face every day in hospitals and medical care.
When trauma is faced even at a place where you expected unconditional
help, you certainly lose hope and dive deep into an abyss filled with just
darkness.
What Is Happening?
We all know women and young girls have been the victim of centuries of institutionalized discrimination and bias, but the fact that this monstrosity would also creep into our healthcare system is nothing less than a tragedy.
Each day millions of women visit their doctors in the hope of receiving the assistance they so dearly need but end up being the prey of the dehumanizing treatment they receive in hospitals worldwide.
Women going out especially for sexual and reproductive healthcare checkups are the biggest group of such victims, where they have to put up with insensitive comments on their body.
When anyone shares an intimate problem with a doctor, they don't expect it to backfire as societal judgements and opinions, the least they expect is to have a respectable treatment that does not treat them as inanimate problems but as an equal and important component of our society.
Gynecologists appointments, which are expected to be serious and inclusive regarding the issues faced by women, usually end up as a commentary on how their body should ideally look like. Any deviation from this ‘ideal’ appearance is laughed off.
These are seemingly innocent conversations that leave a deep scar on women. This fear gets so deep-rooted that many women suffering prefer not to consult doctors and downplay their need for intimate healthcare. Not just this, women are judged for their sexuality and the independent choices they make regarding their bodies.
Unrealistic norms surrounding abortion are imposed over women, single mothers, and unmarried women opting for abortion are judged relentlessly. They are degraded as outcasts, their moral values are discredited, but the sad part is this hideous trend starts from the core of women health care institutions.
Consent is deemed of no value at many hospitals, with private spaces being breached again and again. Patients are considered secondary beings, with no respect paid to their boundaries.
In India, there have been instances of doctors inducing forced abortion, on a woman carrying a female child, without even her prior knowledge. The sheer stress and helplessness a woman can feel after such a tragic incident is unimaginable.
Why Is It a Tremendous Problem?
Overall it is a massive mesh of interconnected traditional biases working against women at the most important places of all, hospitals. This situation is no better with female doctors, with many patients complaining of even worse experiences than from male doctors.
The reason why it has become a point of massive concern when even our hospitals start culturing and practicing such discriminatory and disrespecting practices is that hospitals are the foundational basis on which the entirety of our societal well-being stands.
When women will be afraid of coming out of their homes to get basic health care, it will pull us all down.
It should be a matter of national
importance, especially in a country such as ours where our women-centric health
care system fares even worse than countries such as Pakistan and Afghanistan
according to the latest Gender Gap Report published by the World Economic
Forum. But the problem is bigger than this.
Why Is It Happening?
Our healthcare system does not function in isolation from our entire society, rather it is an inseparable and integral part of our society. The biases we hold and profess as a society are represented, institutionalized and amplified in places like our schools, playgrounds, workplace and indeed our hospitals.
It is needless to say that removing the deep-rooted, systematic gender bias and inequality, in our society is urgently needed. We have been debating and arguing over this for a way long now, what we need now is to act and to act decisively.
We need to come out of our cocoons, where we have been in for a long
and deep slumber because if we do not act now, the monsters of our creation
will eat us away. Women deserve respectable humane treatment at our hospitals
and society, period. The question is are you ready to take the first step?
Written By - Piyush Pandey
Edited by - Adrija Saha
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