Aggregated News
“We go in for excessive bleeding and come out missing body parts! How does that make sense?”
For more than two years, Carmen Worthy, an incarcerated woman in California, experienced vaginal bleeding between 19 and 22 days per month. “The whole ordeal was painful and my body was weak,” Worthy told Rewire News Group via email. It wasn’t until her hemoglobin dropped to dangerously low levels that prison medical staff started to take her seriously, “which was so messed up as well.”
First, the prison doctor suggested Worthy try the birth control pill, but it gave her headaches and nosebleeds. After that, the only option presented to her was surgery, which the doctor told her would make the bleeding stop. Worthy felt she had no choice but to agree.
Her uterus was removed.
“I felt like I had been raped all over again, knowing they had violated my body,” Worthy said. “It’s like we have no rights over our body … It’s almost as if they looked at our prison time and sentence and decided for us not to populate.”...