I’m sick of being special. I am.
I want to be ordinary.
What brought this on?
I was clicking through some of the July 28th Weekend Links (thank you, Liz!), and the article about birth control advice for women over 40 caught my eye, and while reading it, I became curious about the source quoted there, Jennifer McCullen, a physician at Ob/Gyn Women’s Centre of Lakewood Ranch. That led me to the Lakewood Ranch Medical Center, The Women’s Center:
“Caring for the special needs of women at every stage of life is the focus of The Women’s Center at Lakewood Ranch Medical Center. Separate from the main hospital. Private and with easily-accessible parking, the center’s experienced team of medical professionals coordinate care in areas of obstetrics and gynecology, labor and delivery and urology, with special attention to childbirth and breast care.”
Special needs just stopped me in my tracks.
Really?
As far as I know, human reproduction has been happening more or less the same way forever.
In whatever way the moments of conception and birth were reached, whatever the stories of the people involved, they did include a fertile woman’s body ready to hold, to carry, and to nourish through all its phases a zygote, embryo to a fetus, and to eventually deliver, a human baby.
So, why are body-experiences as relate to reproduction, or to the menstrual cycle, considered special situations like in the quote above describing The Women’s Center’s services, or “special” in another way — embarrassing, inappropriate to mention, to-be-hidden, as Fit Chick reminds us is more often than not the case, in her blog post, Breaking the Curse?
Actually, today, I don’t care so much about the whys — but go ahead and add to the comments: because that could help us to understand ourselves, our collective story of how we got here, and that may help us to move beyond this space where our common body-experiences as potentially child-bearing, menstruating humans is treated as other, rather than ordinary.
Deeply and widely quality-of-life affecting, ordinary.
And yet, managing our experiences, just talking about them….these are still special situations.
Special situations – at every stage of our lives?
I’m sick of being special.
I want to be ordinary.
Thank you! I feel like I might have written this myself.
On a related note, I was stunned to learn, not long ago, that pregnancy at 35 or older is medically termed ‘elderly pregnancy‘. A number of friends and colleagues, as well as my sister, have had first (or final) babies between the ages of 35 and 40, and some of the medical terminology makes it seem as though they’re 75!
While I dislike the commercialization of the women’s health movement by centers like this one, one thing that that the women’s health movement has shown is the fallacy of “one size fits all” medicine.
Also, separating labor and delivery from other parts of the hospital reduces the risk of infection. Of course, the risk would be lower at home.