If men had to get IUDs, they’d get epidurals and a hospital stay
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If men had to get IUDs, they’d get epidurals and a hospital stay
By Casey Johnston - The Outline
October 2, 2018
“Insertions of the best method of birth control can be blindingly painful during and after, but all women get is a single over-the-counter painkiller. Why?”
“You hear that IUDs hurt, though accounts vary in a way that is extreme and will lead you, falsely, to hope for the best. Some people tell you you can go right back to work after. Some say you feel essentially nothing, maybe a pinch. Everyone I know who has an IUD LOVES theirs and said nothing of the insertion process. But a surprising number of people, as I discovered while trying to determine if my own acute suffering post-insertion was abnormal, describe it as the worst pain they've experienced in their life. The worst of it is blinding and minutes long, and then about 75 percent of that pain goes on for hours. And that’s if nothing goes wrong, like the device jams, and the doctor has to try again a second time.”
”I suspect at least part of the reason everyone downplays how bad IUD insertions can hurt is that they don’t want to put women off what is, functionally, maybe the best birth control method out there. If you pay close attention, when you sign up, the description of what you are about to go through changes a lot from the day you make your appointment (“just a pinch for five years of no babies!”) to a few minutes before it happens (“one bad day, but still, five years of no babies!”) to after it’s done (“cramps and spotting for up to a month, but what will pull you through is remembering, five years of no babies!”). Being that neither the instructions nor the experience is consistent, even if the people for whom this operation is excruciatingly painful were a minority, it would be cruel to dismiss them as unfortunate outliers when we don’t do that for basically any other procedure.”