Gynocide: Hysterectomy, Capitalist Patriarchy, and the Medical Abuse of Women by Mariarosa Dalta Costa

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Why is hysterectomy a topic that needs to be discussed? Because, as is recognized in international journals of gynecology, there has been an explosion of hysterectomies (the surgical removal of the uterus), often accompanied by salpingo oophorectomy (the surgical removal of the ovarian apparatus).

This explosion of the removal of the female organs cannot be justified by an explsosion of diseases. 

The United States is the leader in the trend to perform hysterectomies. In the U.S., one out of three women can expect to undergo this operation by the age of 60. The operation has complications in as many as 50% of the cases. Women of middle-age are caught in a kind of 'net' which is meant to entrap them. 

Women who are middle-age and/or who have had the number of children they desire are at the greatest risk of being hysterectomized. Women are led to endure, without sufficient cause, an operation which has a severe physical and mental impact on their lives.

The outcome of such an approach to hysterectomy is seen in the frequency with which the operation has been and is being performed.

As for medicine, its aggressive practice as in the case of hysterectomy causes morbidity, infirmity and unhappiness and thus creates misery because the practice causes women to be increasingly dependent on the market and laboratory; at the expense of their vital creative energies and of their economic resources.

The balance and strength of a body is expressed through its complex of organs.

Therefore, a woman is the product of the history that her body - within which her mind lives symbiotically with her genital apparatus and the full set of other organs - has lived, and is living. A woman is her body.

How can it be imagined that assailing a woman's body in such a significant and characteristic part of her sexual identity would not seriously harm her physically and psychologically; creating a deep wound in her person?

That is a mechanical view of women, women as merely machines that reproduce other human beings. That is a distorted view of women as producers of children  whose usefulness is limited to this function - a vision that believes as they near the end of their fertility that their bodies can be stripped of parts that are no longer thought to be necessary.

The uterus and the ovaries are essential parts of the body. They are irreplaceable (except in extreme circumstances) because they play a role in reproducing the body as such; being an integral part of it. They are part of the fabric of life woven by and between the organs of the body. They are the reproductive powers of the body itself.

Doctors who remember to act according to the Hippocratic oath - "according to science and conscience" - should first of all stop recommending to women and imposing on women the physical and psychological trauma of unwarranted "surgical menopause" brought on by Hysterectomy which is notoriously an experience much worse than a natural and gradual passage to menopause.

NOTE: 'Natural menopause' is a normal and 'natural' decline in hormones over a period of years. Hysterectomy, on the other hand, is an immediate and abrupt hault to production of hormones. A woman's body is necessarily traumatized.

For more information on 'surgical menopause', please see 'About Surgical Menopause' page and 'Is Surgical Menopause a Lie?' page on this site.

Women are not property or objects either of science or of the state and its health services. Doctors do not have the right to violate ethical principles and the fundamental and God-given rights of women.

Hysterectomy expropriates and destroys what makes a body a woman's body. Truly horrifying.....