Hysterectomy Damages Women
On March 27, 2004 women, men and children took to the street in Birmingham, Alabama and joined a year-long protest which was taken up by demonstrators at hospitals in 51 cities, one in each state of the country. The protest took place for a week in each city, and readings of UN BECOMING, a play by Rick Schweikert about the physical, political, economic, and social impact of hysterectomy, were presented in about half of those cities. The Protest & Play year culminated in a march on the Capitol in Washington DC in March 2005. 615,000 women were hysterectomized last year in the U.S. 76% of those women were castrated (her ovaries removed) during the surgery. The removed uterus and ovaries, however, are commonly found to be perfectly normal. What is worse, some women have never consented to the removal of any of these organs. And according to the HERS Foundation's Adverse Effects Data Bank, 99.7% percent of women in an ongoing study were given little or no prior information about the acknowledged adverse effects of hysterectomy — information that is a legal requisite of consent.
No woman can be said to have given consent who is not first fully informed of all the alternatives to and consequences of hysterectomy.