"Forever Pregnant"?

Every time I think that things really can't get any worse ... they do. This time, the affront is the concept of pre-pregnancy, the state in which, new federal guidelines would have us believe, every woman of childbearing age, regardless of whether she intends to have a child or not, exists.

It sounds on the surface like a good, well-meant theory. After all, the recommendations are common-sense, and intentional or not, pregnancies happen ... and it means that women's doctors pay a little more attention to their care. All perfectly unobjectionable -- until you realise, that is, that these new guidelines place the potential for a pregnancy above all other concerns, including such paltry things as the potential mother's wishes and well-being. There was already a faction that holds that the life of a fetus outweighs all other concerns, including the health, physical and emotional, of the woman harboring it. This goes a step beyond even that. It reduces the woman of childbearing age to the status of a potential incubator, and nothing more. It elevates one function of a woman above all other considerations, and worse, by implanting the idea in the heads of our physicians that we will have pregnancies whether we say we will or not, it removes our credibility in the eyes of the doctors treating us. It removes our ability to be our own advocates on this issue.

That's beyond dangerous.

Until now, only children and those judged incompetent of making their own decisions required someone else present to make sure their doctors paid attention to and followed their requests and preferences about their own health care. With this new guideline, in effect, telling our doctors that we don't know what we want and can't be trusted to follow through on our decisions about pregnancy, women stand in danger of being reduced to that status, too. "Pre-pregnancy" is a pernicious idea which needs to be stamped out now, or we can expect to lose our autonomy in health care decisions somewhere not too far down the line.

Think I'm exaggerating the issue? Consider that this guideline has gone out at the federal level. Even if your personal doctor disregards it, how many medications will now have approval for use on "pre-pregnant" women withheld because they might impact a potential fetus? How many of those "pre-pregnant" women will be forced to make do with a possibly less-effective medication because of the worry over the health of a fetus which does not exist and may well never exist? How many of those cases would it take before you found the situation unacceptable? If your answer is "one", here you go.

I have been unable to obtain adequate medical care for my epilepsy
because I am what they'd call pre-pregnant. As my neurologist puts it,
I am a woman of child-bearing age. As such, they flat-out refuse to try
me on any medicines other than the ones proven least likely to affect a
fetus (read: the ones that are paying off my neurologist). Despite the
fact that I have declared my belly a no-fetus zone.
-- shadesong

This isn't new. Any childless woman under the age of about twenty-five who's asked for a tubal ligation can probably tell you that our doctors have always tended to value the potential for reproduction over the wishes of the women sitting in front of them. What's new -- and what's unacceptable -- is that now, instead of viewing that tendency as a shortcoming that needs to be changed, the word from our government is that it's a value to be embraced. That, quite simply, needs to go, and the sooner the better.