The Crisis in Women’s Healthcare and the Hypocrisy of “Pro-Family” Politics

It’s a sentiment whispered in private conversations, shared in frustrated online groups, and felt deeply by countless women across generations: the feeling of being unheard, dismissed, or inadequately cared for by the very healthcare system meant to support them. “Every woman I’ve ever known,” one observer intimately familiar with these struggles recently noted, “including my own mother who had more diagnoses ‘than Carter has liver pills,’ has complained about the level of care they receive… how frequently they leave a medical appointment feeling that they shouldn’t have come.” This isn’t just a collection of unfortunate anecdotes; it’s the lived reality for too many, reflecting a systemic crisis in women’s healthcare. Now, startling new research is providing concrete data that validates these long-standing complaints, painting an alarming picture – a crisis made all the more glaring by political agendas that demand more from women while fundamentally failing to ensure their basic health, dignity, and well-being.

The Weight of Policy: When Laws Inflict Mental Distress

The first piece of this troubling puzzle comes from a recent study published in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Researchers examining the impact of Texas’s Senate Bill 8 (SB8) – the restrictive “Heartbeat Act” that effectively banned abortions after approximately six weeks of pregnancy in September 2021 – found a significant and deeply concerning consequence: a measurable increase in “frequent mental distress” among women of reproductive age in the state.

Using a rigorous statistical approach, the study compared women in Texas to several control groups, including men in Texas and women in other states with different abortion laws. The findings were stark. After SB8 took effect, women in Texas experienced an adjusted increase of 6.8 percentage points in frequent mental distress (defined as 14 or more days of poor mental health in the past month) compared to men in Texas. The impact was even more pronounced for younger women aged 18-29, who saw a 9.8 percentage point greater increase in mental distress than their male Texan counterparts. Similar increases were found when comparing Texas women to women in other states. This isn’t just a statistic; it’s a clear signal that restrictive reproductive health policies can directly and negatively harm women’s mental well-being on a massive scale, adding an immense emotional burden to their lives.

“It’s All In Your Head”: The Epidemic of Medical Gaslighting

If state policies are one source of distress, direct interactions within the healthcare system itself are proving to be another. A second recent study, published in JAMA Network Open and reported by NBC News, investigated the experiences of women seeking care for vulvovaginal disorders – conditions that can cause significant pain, sexual dysfunction, and bladder or bowel issues. The findings are a sobering confirmation of what many women have long reported: their symptoms are often “gaslighted,” dismissed, or invalidated by healthcare providers.

Led by OB-GYN Dr. Chailee Moss of George Washington University, who was motivated by “years and years of hearing such experiences from patients,” the study surveyed 447 women. The results are deeply troubling:

• On average, participants felt that only 43.5% of their past medical practitioners had been supportive.
• More than a quarter of providers were described as belittling, and about 20% simply did not believe the patient.
• Over 40% of women were told they “just need to relax more.”
• About 20% were advised to “have a glass of wine” to cope with physical pain.
• Nearly 40% were made to “feel crazy” or that their symptoms were “all in your head.”
• A significant number of women reported stopping their pursuit of medical care due to these dismissive experiences, leading to delayed diagnoses and prolonged suffering. Shockingly, an estimated 20% were referred to psychiatry without receiving medical treatment for their tangible physical symptoms.

This isn’t just poor bedside manner; it’s a systemic failure to listen to and believe women about their own bodies, a phenomenon that causes immense distress and can have serious health consequences.

A Systemic Sickness: Is the Problem Baked into Medical Culture and Training?

The immediate question these studies provoke is a difficult one: “Are doctors being trained to mistreat or dismiss female patients?” While it’s highly unlikely that medical curricula explicitly teach such attitudes, the persistence of these experiences across generations of patients and, as one observer noted, “when younger doctors are just as bad as older doctors,” strongly suggests that the problem is systemic, woven into the very fabric of medical culture, training, or the healthcare system’s operational pressures.

Why? The reasons don’t come easily as they love to hide behind ‘established norms,’ but here are a few reasons.

Historical Gender Bias: Medicine, like many institutions, has a long patriarchal history. Implicit biases about women being “overly emotional,” “anxious,” or prone to exaggerating symptoms may still linger, influencing how their pain and health concerns are perceived and valued compared to men’s.

Gaps in Medical Knowledge: There may be insufficient training in medical schools regarding certain complex women’s health conditions, particularly chronic pain syndromes or conditions with less straightforward diagnostic markers.

Systemic Pressures: The modern healthcare system often imposes severe time constraints on patient visits, potentially leading to rushed encounters, less empathetic listening, and a quicker resort to dismissive explanations.

Devaluation of Subjective Experience: A medical model that heavily prioritizes objective, measurable signs over a patient’s subjective experience of their own body can inadvertently lead to the dismissal of legitimate suffering if it doesn’t fit neat diagnostic boxes.

As one frustrated individual put it, “an examination of the whole system is in order.” It’s not enough to address individual “bad apple” practitioners; the structures and cultural norms that allow such widespread negative experiences for female patients must be confronted.

The Pronatalist Contradiction: Demanding Babies, Dismissing Women

This crisis in women’s healthcare takes on an even more jarring dimension when juxtaposed with the political rhetoric and policy pushes from certain factions, often on the right, that champion “family values” and call for increased birth rates. If any political movement or party truly “wants more babies and more stay-at-home parents” (a role that traditionally places immense physical and emotional health burdens on women, especially during childbearing and child-rearing years), then the current state of healthcare for those very women is not just counterproductive, it’s an act of profound hypocrisy.

How can a society that claims to value motherhood and family simultaneously tolerate a healthcare system where women fear being disbelieved, where their pain is trivialized, and where seeking care can leave them feeling “they shouldn’t have come”? How can policies that demonstrably increase women’s mental distress be squared with a supposed concern for family well-being? True “pro-family” or genuinely “pronatalist” policies must, at their very foundation, ensure comprehensive, respectful, accessible, and high-quality healthcare for all women – before, during, and long after pregnancy, and for all their unique health needs across their lifespan. Anything less is just empty rhetoric.

Beyond Lip Service – A Revolution Needed in Women’s Healthcare

The evidence from these recent JAMA studies, combined with the chorus of lived experiences shared by women for decades, paints an undeniable picture: our healthcare system is too often failing women. This is not about isolated incidents of miscommunication or rare diagnostic challenges; it’s about systemic issues involving policy impacts, ingrained medical biases, and a culture that can still be dismissive of women’s voices regarding their own health.

The current state of affairs is unacceptable and unsustainable, particularly if society genuinely values women and the families they may choose to build and nurture. This calls for more than just incremental improvements; it demands a fundamental re-evaluation and, indeed, a revolution in how women’s health is approached, researched, taught in medical schools, and prioritized by policymakers. Women deserve a healthcare system where they are heard, believed, treated with dignity, and empowered as active partners in their own care. That is not just a prerequisite for better individual health outcomes; it’s a prerequisite for any honest and meaningful societal conversation about the future of families and the well-being of generations to come. And most fundamentally, no one should be punished, in body or spirit, for simply trying to survive and seek care within that system.