Posts Tagged: reproductive healthcare
Weight, What? How Fatphobia Impacts Reproductive Care
Fatphobia, the institutional bias against plus-size bodies, is rampant in the way we view ourselves and each other. Popular culture depicts the slim woman, (size 6 at most) as normal, despite sizes 16-18 being the true average women’s size in the US. Anyone outside this cultural norm or skinniness is deemed undesirable—as literally taking up too much space in society. This can be seen in the othering and separation of plus size clothing or models, the cultural obsession with dieting and weight loss products, and the fetishization or degradation of fat women on social media. Everywhere we look, we are flooded with false messaging telling us that to be fat is to be different and unwanted. Fatphobia is perhaps at its most harmful when it influences healthcare. Weight bias in… Read more »
In Favor of a Full Bush: Why I Want Healthcare Education to include Pubes
This past week, as a part of my first official semester in nursing school, I learned how to insert a urinary catheter. A urinary catheter is a tube that is inserted into the bladder via the urethra when the bladder does not empty pee as normal. My nursing class learned how to insert catheters into urethras that were located above adult vaginas. The whole process of learning how to insert a catheter began with reading about it, then watching a video on how to do it, and finally practicing on a mannequin that is supposed to simulate a real life adult human person. While I watched the catheter-insertion video and then later in lab while I readied my mannequin’s vagina for practice, I was perplexed. Why? Because both the mannequin… Read more »
