Menstruation

"In both developed and developing regions of the world, properly trained midwives, public health nurses, and comparable health and auxiliary personnel can conduct procedures early in pregnancy under adequate supervision. An advantage of their involvement may be their ability to provide a higher quality of pre- and post-abortion care and counseling than a busy physician can offer, thereby securing better and perhaps more confidential overall patient management. They already play an important role in fertility control, including menstrual regulation to which the earliest abortion is analogous."

"[I]ts hard to find a society, a religion or a part of the world that does not find some way to make women feel dirty, guilty, unworthy or dangerous because of their monthly cycle. "Menstrual taboos are so widespread, theyre almost a cultural universal," says Beverly Strassmann, evolutionary anthropologist and biologist at the University of Michigan who studies menstrual taboos. Yet there are exceptions: societies that treat menstruating women with respect. The negative associations with menstruation are well-known. Women may be prohibited from sexual intercourse, banned from places of worship or segregated in special huts. Various theories about the widespread prohibitions and restrictions range from false beliefs that menstrual blood carries toxic bacteria to fears that the blood triggers castration anxiety in men to beliefs that the smell of the blood disturbs animals and interferes with hunting."

"Then he started his period. one week in bed. two doctors in. three painkillers four times a day.And later a letter to the powers-that-be demanding full-paid menstrual leave twelve weeks a year. I see him now, his selfish pale face peering at the moon through the bathroom window. The curse, he said, the curse"

"In the developing world, menstrual regulation is still a crucial strategy to circumvent anti-abortion laws."

"Reclaiming the female body retrieving it piece by piece from the grip of patriarchal culture and medical practice, has been a central feminist goal for each of the last two decades. Menstruation-represented in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by the American white middle and upper classes as a woman’s shame, her “curse,” as an agency of weakness and disability-is now front and center of the feminist agenda as topic that needs to be rethought."

"The more effective of the two post-coital methods of contraception is to induce menstruation before fertilization or implantation can take place. Many herbal recipes to induce menstruation were taught by Hippocrates, “the father of medicine,” who lived in ancient Athens 460–377 B.C.E. He had gathered his recipes from women whose traditions of medicine were already thousands of years old. Centuries later, some of these methods for inducing menstruation for contraception were published by Peter of Spain before he was made Pope John XXI in 1276. Despite their toxicity, herbs are still used worldwide in attempts to induce menstruation (Riddle, 1992)."

"RU-486 is properly called an abortifacient. Because it is a drug that can induce a menstrual period after the implantation of a fertilized egg in the uterus, it can terminate a womans pregnancy in its earliest stages."

"Crosses her knees and wags left leg to rhythm. Type of by-words: a two-hundred-forty-two word area of the commonest pubescent slang fenced in by a number of obviously European polysyllabics. Sighs a good deal in class. Let me see. Yes. Now comes the last week in November. Sighs a good deal in class. Chews gum vehemently. Does not bite her nails though if she did, this would conform better to her general pattern — scientifically speaking, of course. Menstruation, according to the subject, well established. Belongs at present to no church organization. By the way, Mr. Haze, her mother was —? Oh, I see. And you are —? Nobody’s business is, I suppose, God’s business. Something else we wanted to know. She was no regular home duties, I understand. Making a princess of your Dolly, Mr. Haze, he? Well, what else have we got here? Handles books gracefully. Voice pleasant. Giggles rather often."

"How reliable is the womans menstrual history in determining where she is in her cycle, namely that she is preovulatory? In a study by Novikova et al., they found the history of the first day of the last period to be unreliable 39 percent of the time (Novikova et al. 2007). In addition they found a wide range of cycle lengths with the first day of one period to the first day of the next to be 21 to 35 days. With a longer cycle the woman could be on day 17 of her cycle but still be preovulatory and with a shorter cycle she could be on day 13 of her cycle and be postovulatory. Although one may suspect the woman is approaching ovulation on pelvic exam with the presence of highly fertile mucus at the cervical os, it is impossible for a physician to determine whether the woman is preovulatory on a pelvic exam, in particular in a woman who has just been sexually assaulted. How reliable are LH testing and progesterone levels done stat in the emergency room in determining where the woman is in her cycle? The LH surge goes on over a twenty-four-hour period, and is usually detected by testing a first-morning concentrated urine. A random urine specimen, particularly late at night, may not detect the LH surge. In addition, serum progesterone levels are not emergency tests, and the results often are not available for twenty-four hours, even in major metropolitan hospitals, and even longer in small community hospitals. Therefore, this protocol may not have a timely progesterone level available to help determine if a woman is preovulatory in the emergency room."

"Worldwide, the amount of ethnographic and textual work on menstruation is disproportionately larger than the amount of archaeological work on the subject. While researching for my project at Deir el-Medina, I found only four published studies that attempt to identify menstruation in the archaeological record: Claassen 2011, Faust and Katz 2017, Bengtson 2017, and Crown 1985. I was not surprised by this result, as menstruation is still taboo in the western world, but the result also stems from the lack of visibility of menstruation in the archaeological record. Patricia Galloway’s “Where have all the menstrual huts gone?” rightfully points out that this is unsubstantiated assumption, one not supported by the ethnographic and textual descriptions of these practices."

"Archaeologically, understanding cultural behaviors surrounding menstruation is important because it can provide glimpses into gender relations and gender roles that allow us to understand the social structuring of past societies. However, it is equally important that menstruation be studied in order to personify and connect to the people of the past. As a teenager, I felt removed from the great women of history due to the elimination of menstruation from their stories. This removal is discussed often in literary circles, but it also needs to be tackled in archaeology. Menstruation is a biological continuity that has always occurred to half of the human population and there needs to be a cultural history that is representative of this reality."

"When the menstrual purgations appear in the wives, their husbands should not approach them, out of regard to the children to be begotten. For the Law has forbidden it when it says: “You will not come near your wife when she is in her separation” [Lev. 18:19]. Nor, indeed, let them have relations when their wives are with child. For [in that case] they are not doing it for the begetting of children, but only for the sake of pleasure. Now a lover of God should not be a lover of pleasure."