When it comes to reproductive health, women are expected to put up with pain
Back in October, the government announced it was renewing its Women’s Health Strategy, with measures including a cervical cancer elimination plan, the introduction of Jess’s Rule for repeated unresolved symptoms, and menopause advice being added to free health checks.
Speaking about the strategy renewal, Health and Social Care Secretary Wes Streeting said: “We inherited a broken NHS, and as a result too many women are still subject to a system that doesn’t listen to their experiences or understand their needs. Whether it’s being passed from one specialist to another for conditions like endometriosis or PCOS, the lack of proper pain relief during procedures, or unacceptable gynaecology waiting lists – it’s clear the system is failing women, and it shouldn’t be happening.”
Medical misogyny has deep roots, with women’s health long treated as less important. As Caroline Criado Perez points out in Invisible Women, that bias stretches from Ancient Greek ideas about “hysteria” to modern healthcare systems that still treat men and women differently for the same symptoms. With less than 2.5% of medical research funding going to women’s reproductive health, and women still underrepresented in clinical trials, it’s no surprise the problem persists.
Recent Mumsnet research found that 58% of users surveyed agree that the NHS is institutionally misogynistic; 68% believe that the NHS doesn’t take women’s health concerns seriously; 50% say they have been dismissed, ignored or not believed by an NHS professional because they are a woman; and 64% say they have been explicitly told their pain or symptoms were “normal” or “in their head”. As Mumsnet founder Justine Roberts told the Guardian, “Few examples capture medical misogyny more clearly than the expectation that women should tolerate severe pain during gynaecological procedures. No woman should be expected to endure avoidable pain as the price of care.”
Journalist Anna O’Neill has heard from a number of women suffering years of debilitating pain from endometriosis (a condition where tissue similar to the lining of the womb grows outside it, which can cause heavy periods, severe pelvic pain and infertility). The average time to get an endometriosis diagnosis in the UK is 9 years and 4 months, and the women that shared their experiences with O’Neill reported waits of several years before receiving treatment, coming close to death after not receiving the correct treatment, suffering mental torment from having to cope with constant pain, and even losing their jobs.
Sanju Pal, another woman that’s spoken to O’Neill, had her role terminated after failing to meet performance targets after taking time off for endometriosis surgery and recovery. Seven years after the dismissal in 2019 and after two employment tribunals, Pal won an appeal after findings concluded that “the original tribunal had failed to take into account that she was a disabled person as a result of endometriosis and that she had been subject to discrimination because of her disability.” She is now campaigning to have endometriosis officially recognised as a disability.
Pain is also the expectation in more routine procedures, such as getting an IUD, like the coil, fitted. It should take 5 to 10 minutes to get inserted, and according to the NHS website, “Most people have some pain when having an IUD fitted. You may want to take some painkillers like paracetamol or ibuprofen an hour before. If you’re concerned about pain during the fitting, speak to the nurse or doctor. They may be able to offer you extra pain relief, such as local anaesthesia.”
The BBC’s Naga Munchetty has spoken about her traumatic experience in getting the coil fitted. She was not offered any sedation or anaesthetic, despite fainting twice during the procedure and screaming “so loud that her husband tried to find out what room she was in, to make the procedure stop.” Caitlin Moran, who also passed out multiple times from the pain during her IUD insertion and was offered a Lucozade in response, has argued that all women should be offered pain relief for this procedure. “I want women to be routinely given local anaesthetic or effective pain relief every time they have an IUD inserted or removed. Why in the name of baby Jesus is this not standard?” she writes. “Why is it not standard? Why is it presumed that women will be fine with having their cervix artificially dilated with a pair of metal barbecue tongs before having what is basically the wire coat hanger from a doll’s house inserted into their uterus?”
Hysteroscopies (where a thin telescope is passed through the cervix to help examine the uterus) is another relatively routine procedure that leaves many women in agony, with 1 in 3 patients suffering severe pain during the treatment. It’s been described as “totally barbaric”, “medieval torture” and like being “flayed alive”, with many women also reporting that pain relief was never discussed during their procedures. Jess, one of our readers, underwent a hysteroscopy and endometrial polyp removal in 2025 without adequate pain relief (she was given a stress ball and a heat pack, and later gas and air) and endured an agonising procedure that left her unable to properly advocate for herself, traumatised, embarrassed, and in significant pain and discomfort for the two weeks following.
In her complaint letter to the NHS, she wrote that “the whole process surrounding this procedure sets women up to fail” because “you are asking women to advocate for themselves based on the pain level they are experiencing without taking into account the context in which female pain exists. Before the procedure, I was told 8/10 women could handle it. I therefore assumed I was weak for feeling such unbearable pain so kept trying to push through. This statistic is meaningless. Each woman’s pain should be judged against her own threshold. This statistic is both unhelpful and damaging for those women for whom this procedure is excruciating.” She describes the experience as “medical gaslighting”.
The Campaign Against Painful Hysteroscopy has collected over 8000 responses to its hysteroscopy pain survey and over 68,000 signatures for its petition to “End barbaric NHS hysteroscopies with inadequate pain-relief”. The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists has revised their guidelines on the procedure to say that “outpatient hysteroscopy can be associated with significant pain, anxiety and embarrassment” and that women “should be made aware of other settings and modes of anaesthesia for hysteroscopy (e.g. procedure under general or regional anaesthesia, intravenous sedation) as an alternative to outpatient hysteroscopy.”
There has been some positive news in another area of women’s healthcare. In 2023, Yvette Greenway-Mansfield won a settlement worth at least £1million from the NHS after she suffered traumatic complications from a vaginal mesh implant, a surgery that was found to have been both premature and unnecessary. The following year, 140 women who experienced complications from vaginal mesh implants received payouts after successfully winning a group claim against the manufacturers. Vaginal mesh had been widely used to treat pelvic organ prolapse and incontinence, often after childbirth, until 2018 when the scale of complications associated with the implants became apparent. Many women experienced, and have been left with, chronic pain, nerve damage, difficulty walking, bladder and bowel perforations, and difficulty having sex.
In the Independent Medicines and Medical Devices Safety Review, Baroness Julia Cumberlege found that “Women, in reporting to us their extensive mesh complications, have spoken of excruciating chronic pain feeling like razors inside their body, damage to organs, the loss of mobility and sex life and depression and suicidal thoughts. Some clinicians’ reactions ranged from ‘it’s all in your head’ to ‘these are women’s issues’ or ‘it’s that time of life’ wherein anything and everything women suffer is perceived as a natural precursor to, part of, or a post-symptomatic phase of, the menopause. For the women concerned this was tantamount to a complete denial of their concerns and being written off by a system that was supposed to care.”
Despite the wins that are arising from the vaginal mesh implants lawsuits, something that hopefully opens the door for more affected women to receive compensation, medical misogyny, including poor maternity care, is ensuring that the gender health gap remains wide.
We’re shining a light on the issues women continue to face as part of our Year of the Woman campaign. The World Economic Forum has said it could take 123 years to reach global gender parity, meaning several generations may pass without seeing true equality in their lifetimes. We firmly believe that, particularly in the current climate, a level playing field will only be achieved if these issues continue to be highlighted and challenged. Find more Year of the Woman content here.
