Aggregated News
It was a hot afternoon in October 2019, and 22-year-old Joan* [Names have been changed] had just been crying in a ward of a private hospital in Mokola, a neighbourhood of Ibadan in southwestern Nigeria.
Seven days earlier, she had started taking hormone injections to stimulate her ovaries into producing mature eggs, part of the process to get her body ready so that the doctors could extract them.
Joan felt a bit uncomfortable from the examination and had a few painful spots on her lower abdomen where she had been jabbed by the hormone injections. But her tears were not due to the invasive nature of the procedure. Rather it was the doctor’s demeanour, which she says was rude and condescending.
“When he came in to do the examination, I asked him if it was possible to get a female gynaecologist since a female one examined me during my initial visit. He flared up, said no female gynaecologist was on duty,” she recounts. “He proceeded to ask what was so special about my body, said he had seen plenty...