Lena Dunham has written a well-crafted essay on her decision to have a hysterectomy at the age of 31 after the agony of endometriosis got too much. She had resigned herself to the belief that she “would never be able to be anyone’s mother” with the level of pain she was experiencing.
I’m one of the few people in the world who has never heard Lena Dunham speak (I’ve never seen Girls, or an interview with her), so I don’t really get the vitriolic backlash to her hysterectomy on Twitter (I will be exploring the Girls box-set at some point in the future for sure).
She has always wanted children:
The fact is, I never had a single doubt about having children. Not one, since the day I could understand how families were made. And pregnancy was the glorious beginning of that vision.
So how will she cope in the aftermath of her hysterectomy?
At first her mind and her spirit are in bits; she grieves, weeps “big stupid sobs“, finally allowed to say goodbye now that there is the time and space to do so.
But the fear that other people’s baby news would destroy her is unfounded: she finds that she can manage friends’ and acquaintances’ sonograms and social media feeds better than when she had her faulty uterus.
Many of my friends are pregnant, or trying. I was worried I’d handle it badly. Turn quietly bitter. Drink too much champagne at the baby shower. Sad old Aunt Lena.
Her own ghost children, the ones that might have been, still break her heart.
She ends on a resilient note though, which I like:
I wanted to know what nine months of complete togetherness could feel like. I was meant for the job, but I didn’t pass the interview. And that’s OK. It really is. I might not believe it now, but I will soon enough. And all that will be left is my story and my scars, which are already faded enough that they’re hard to find.
She’ll adopt, I think; I have the feeling she won’t be without children for long. (I hope that being rich, famous and privileged won’t give her unfair advantages that us civilians don’t have).
If she decided to do nothing, I think she’d be childfree and OK, which would be inspirational. (But probably won’t happen.)
She’s a divisive figure Lena, and prone to foot in mouth, or rather saying things she probably believes, and then retracting them when it seems lots of people disagree with her. But I don’t see how there can be a backlash to this story. Its real.Its sad. She’ll definitely adopt, Im sure.
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I think the backlash is about her saying one time that she wished she’d had an abortion. But I’m basing that on the three minutes I spent on Twitter earlier.
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The unfortunate backlash about her hysterectomy isn’t about Lena herself. All of us with endometriosis feel her pain, and many have made the same decision she did for the same reasons.
It is a common myth, still purported by uninformed members of the medical community (and this does include actual OB/GYNs) that a hysterectomy can cure endometriosis. It absolutely cannot. If there is disease left behind in the rest of her pelvic cavity, it will continue to grow and she’ll still be having more pain and more surgeries.
The issue is, and what people are most concerned about, is that because she is a celebrity, Lena’s decision may have a tremendous negative impact on other women suffering from endo, who may think that because she had a hysterectomy, it’s the right way to treat endo. Now, we would of course hope that people would be more intelligent than to follow the advice of a celebrity, but we know that isn’t often the case. If women with endometriosis go to their OB/GYN and say they want a hysterectomy, that doctor WILL SAY YES, because they hope it will appease the patient that they “did everything they could.” The sad fact is, doctors have even recommended hysterectomies in teenagers because the doctors themselves don’t have the surgical skills to treat endo any other way.
I feel so bad for Lena because I think she will regret her decision and not only because she is now infertile. Statistically, her endo will come back and she will be no better off for having had the hysterectomy. And now she will have to live with the outcome of this decision.
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Thanks so much for that. Although I have stage 4 endo myself I honestly don’t know a lot about the hysterectomy route. My pain has never been debilitating or disabling in my daily life, more an annoyance. I had heard of endo continuing after hysterectomy but haven’t explored it in depth. I’ve experienced doctors who didn’t have the first clue how to advise me about endo, though, and I can see the danger now that the publicity from this might generate. It’s pretty worrying, actually
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I think Lena kicks ass for her candor and sharing her journey as a woman with such transparency. I honestly hate use of the term “divisive” when someone is sharing their truth as they see it and others don’t always agree with it, or if someone actually learns from their mistakes and owns up to them. People verbally punish celebrities – especially feminists – in ways that we would never imagine doing to people we know ourselves. She got dragged through the mud and slut-shamed when she was curvier, and when she lost weight she was equally trashed. None of us know her. She’s imperfect, as are the rest of us, but I get extraordinarily irritiated when people use the term “divisive” as if she’s out there aggressively trying to divide people rather than simply stating her opinion that not everyone shares. People love to shame women who don’t feel like they have to “play nice” simply because they are female or a public figure or a “role model”.
She may adopt, she may not, why do we care is my question? Why is it an assumption that she’s pro-adoption? Not everyone equates it the same, and the fact is, adoption starts out with loss, and some people don’t feel prepared to handle those unique challenges that can come up as adoptive parents. And if she does…How do we know she’ll get selected by a birth family? Everyone goes through the same paperwork and training and background checks to adopt, and we have to be careful to not imply that she’ll automatically get a kid if she does make the choice to go down the adoption road. Not everyone chooses to adopt simply because they are infertile, and not everyone who chooses to adopt gets their wish – these things go upside down every day, I am proof of that after waiting 2 years for a child from Ethiopia then watching that program close and having to start all over again domestically, and 7 months later, still no closer to motherhood, and if at the end of 2018 we are still childless because no one have picked us? We’re stopping. No more holding our breath. Not because we don’t want to become parents, but because there’s a whole life to be lived and we have suffered enough.
Will she get dragged through the mud if she announces she is not interested in adoption? Probably. Will she get dragged through the mud if she does proceed towards adoption and compared with Angelina Jolie if she goes international? When I was younger I didn’t want children, and it didn’t happen until I was in my 30’s that I knew. My best friend when I was younger was the one I thought would have 5 kids but decided by her late 20’s that she wasn’t interested in that road. Others are too goddamn tired after their bodies go through the hell of infertility treatments, surgeries, etc. to take on a different avenue towards parenthood. Hell, when I talked to a couple care providers about adoption, the first thing they asked me is if I’d be breastfeeding – as if I’m going to put my body through any more trauma and risk even more biological failure by trying to do that (and y’all know how judge-y people get about choosing to breastfeed or not!). I dare someone to call me divisive or a flip-flopper simply because my opinions and choices about motherhood (and anything else) evolve as I get older.
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Thanks EF for your food for thought. I just wrote a reply and it disappeared so I’m doing another but hope I’m not repeating myself…
Dunham says in her piece that “Adoption is a thrilling truth I’ll pursue with all my might” so I guess she’s pro-adoption… She also mentions investigating her eggs so who knows…
I can’t believe the first thing you were quizzed about was breastfeeding, is that really the very top priority? Gah. Quite staggering.
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Gotcha – I didn’t see that piece on adoption, thanks for clarifying! Yeah the breastfeeding thing, as I told the doc “one more thing to risk failure in my body? nope, i don’t think so!” 🙂
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My mother couldn’t breastfeed me so I always get really annoyed by the militant breastfeeding freaks. Great if you can do it, but it shouldn’t be a major biggie if you can’t – one more thing to berate women about.
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Totally… Ironically it’s the one thing about being pregnant I was not looking forward to during my brief time as a pregnant person before we lost our baby.
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I thought about it a lot too – I felt very, very complicated about it. I googled it and found lots of threads about it – apparently a lot of women are conflicted about it
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I don’t think it’s because she is sharing her truth that she is divisive. I also don’t agree with the trend for tearing people down when they might, off the cuff, express a badly worded opinion. I’m a fan of Lena Dunham, and her work. But she does have a tendency to express opinions, which are not off the cuff remarks, but well thought out think pieces or blog posts, and then retract them when there is widespread backlash to what she has said. This makes her appear insincere, and disingenuous. Also, she is not ‘shamed’ for not playing nice, or for being a woman, I think the biggest problem people have with her is that she is immensely privileged and often appears totally blind to that fact.
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How the hell is there backlash?!?!? This is piece is written by someone who is both grieving the loss of her children and recovering the trauma of having to advocate for medical treatment. Anyone who lashes out at her needs to remove the large stick lodged in their asses.
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Lots of Lena D haters are celebrating the fact that she’ll never reproduce, as well as some criticism of her implying she’s been ‘cured’… I think it’s a moving piece though
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I just looked also. I think people are mad at her for having a hysterectomy….that it’s not a cure for endometriosis. But her body her choice and all that
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Yes they seem to think she’s misinforming people..
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I’m always sorry when I hear about others who have gone through pain and face infertility. Oddly, I’m just about to write a post about another celebrity who has faced infertility. Thanks for alerting us to this.
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Thanks Mali, I’ll be interested to have a look at yours
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