It's Not Hysteria: Everything You Need to Know About Your Reproductive Health (But Were Never Told)

by Karen Tang

Due to these decades of excluding women from research trials, data about everything from heart disease to medication efficacy do not include information about the effects on women or potential gender differences in results.

Fortunately, healthcare that allows people to safely explore and affirm their gender identity has been shown in many research studies to significantly improve depression and anxiety and reduce the risk of self-harm. For these reasons, gender-affirming care can be truly lifesaving and allows gender-diverse people to lead full, healthy, and joyful lives.

Similar to laws banning abortion, laws that criminalize gender-affirming care directly contradict evidence-based standards of medical care. Studies have shown that access to gender-affirming care drastically decreases rates of depression, suicidal thoughts, and self-harm, with up to 70 percent reduction in suicidality in transgender youths. It is truly lifesaving care.

People may regret almost every decision they make in life—undergoing any medical procedure, getting married, deciding to have children. But society isn’t allowed to strip adults’ rights to make these decisions simply because they may regret them later.

When even a judge’s court order cannot protect doctors and patients seeking an abortion for medical reasons, it’s likely that more preventable deaths will occur.

Banning or criminalizing abortion has never stopped abortions from occurring. In fact, the Guttmacher Institute reports that most countries that restrict abortion actually have higher rates of abortion than those that do not, because contraceptive use also tends to be lower in these countries.

The vast majority of abortions in the United States, up to 93 percent, are done in the first trimester. Only 6 percent of abortions are done at fourteen to twenty weeks, and only 1 percent after twenty-one weeks.

When second-trimester abortions are needed, they are often under very difficult social, emotional, and medical circumstances, and these decisions are never made lightly.

Imagine if there was a condition that affected 80 percent of white men and caused hemorrhaging, debilitating pain, severe bloating, constipation, frequent urination, and infertility. I’d wager that scientists would have long ago discovered the exact biological cause,