Columbus, Ohio – Zeba Haydar had convinced herself she didn’t like children.
The 32-year-old graduate of Ohio State University did this sometime after being told at 19 that she would never be able to have a baby.
I was talking with her at the first in what promises to be a nationwide chain of FEMM (Fertility Education & Medical Management) clinics, right on the campus of her alma mater. Haydar may be office manager by title at FEMM, but she’s more importantly a patient — off birth control for a month now.
There’s no religious reason she’s off birth control; she needed no convincing by a Catholic bishop (even as Pope Francis has taken to talking about man and woman and marriage in relation to creation). Her reason is simply a desire for good health and knowledge of what’s going on with her body.
Haydar has been diagnosed as suffering from polycystic ovary syndrome, and, in dealing with this as with many other reproductive-system irregularities, doctors tend to reach for a prescription for birth control to suppress anything that seems to throw a woman’s monthly cycle off in one way or another.
Haydar went to more than ten doctors over the course of twelve years, she says. And they all said very different things about what was going on with her. But they all had the same solution.
“I was very frustrated,” she tells me. “I was told again and again, ‘You have to get on The Pill.’” She explains how she “fought it” — she didn’t want to take a pill for the sake of taking a pill, unsure how it might help — but then she “got on it because I thought I had no other option.” When she stopped, she recalls, she was reprimanded, even though her problems had not been solved by contraception.
When I arrived at FEMM, Haydar was sitting down and looking at her body’s biomarkers: FEMM teaches women to chart what can be easily observed about a cycle. “You get very amazed because you see it on paper in color — what your hormones are doing this month in your body. And it’s amazing because it tells me what is going on. There is no blood work that mainstream medicine does that can reflect what we do here.”
FEMM offers a natural approach to health care, a message that resonates with millennials on campus.
FEMM offers a natural approach to health care, a message that resonates with millennials on campus. Marilou Stafford, clinical nurse manager at FEMM, tells me that young college women who come to the clinic are saying: “I’m organic . . . my chicken doesn’t have antibiotics and hormones; why should I be putting this in my body?” In Stafford’s experience, when these young women put themselves on birth control, they do not know what they are putting in their bodies, and they have little knowledge of possible side effects.
FEMM is essentially women’s health care gone green. It sees ovulation “as a key indicator of health,” Stafford says, and by teaching women to chart their cycles, it helps them to “understand their reproductive health as a fine-tuned interplay of hormonal processes.” FEMM seeks to link “female reproductive science with direct experience,” helping “women to recognize observable biomarkers as vital signs of women’s health.”
One FEMM handout on “The Rights of Women” emphasizes the importance of “informed consent.” On the August Thursday on which I visited FEMM, I also went into a Planned Parenthood clinic just a few blocks away. The contrast couldn’t have been more stark. Whereas I’m greeted the moment I enter FEMM, I seem to go unnoticed at Planned Parenthood, where smiles have gone to die in an institution with poison in its bloodstream. I walk in just days after the sixth in a series of undercover videos concerning Planned Parenthood was released by the Center for Medical Progress. In these videos, the lack of informed consent is seen in the most extreme and horrific ways.
As the body parts of aborted babies are being sought and sold in some Planned Parenthood clinics throughout the country, the babies’ mothers are not necessarily signing off on what’s happening, according to testimony in these videos. “If there was a higher gestation, and the technicians needed it, there were times when they would just take what they wanted,” a former blood-and-tissue-procurement technician for StemExpress explains about the business’s partnership with Planned Parenthood. “And these mothers don’t know. And there’s no way they would know,” she says.
At FEMM, by contrast, the mission is focused primarily on education: about what a sexually transmitted disease could mean for your health down the road, about how to get pregnant or how not to, and, yes, about the risks of taking the contraceptive pill.
Maureen Judson, a FEMM certified nurse practitioner, who like others on staff looks thoroughly at home at the start-up, will “spend an hour often with patients, talking with them,” Stafford explains to me. FEMM makes it a point to take time with patients in their journey, respecting human dignity and looking for solutions.
And while the majority of patients at FEMM have something to do with the university, FEMM accepts insurance and Medicaid and will waive fees if needed (it also has a Spanish-speaking doctor available). The door is open for any woman looking for basic medical care and a better way of looking at her reproductive health.
Knowing when you are ovulating, Stafford says, is “a normal part of being healthy.” And if you’re not ovulating, “we need to find out what the reason is.” This is the kind of empowerment FEMM seeks to give women. “Women want to know they are healthy,” Stafford says.
Haydar, bursting with hope now that she has found a place that wants to help her find out what’s wrong with her — not just mask symptoms or apocalyptically diagnose — talks about her husband, who has helped distribute fliers around campus for FEMM. He “can’t wait to have children,” she tells me. And she is confident that her new colleagues will walk with her toward a solution that won’t require her to lie to herself anymore about who she is and who she wants to be. “The significant difference I’m seeing is that I’m able to understand what’s going on inside my body,” she says. That alone seems a sea change in medicine.