Scandal changed health attitudes

Women’s treatment and rights better since ‘unfortunate experiment’ but breast cancer, weight still challenges

It took one of the biggest scandals in the history of New Zealand healthcare to set women on the path to greater patient rights and better treatment.

The changes came about in 1988 following an inquiry into the “Unfortunate Experiment”, where some women died as a result of a trial on thousands of patients at National Women’s Hospital from the 1960s to the 1980s to not treat early stage cervical cancer in the belief it did not develop into invasive cancer.

At that time in many hospitals in New Zealand anaesthetised women were used to train groups of medical students in vaginal examination without the women’s prior consent or even knowledge.

Led by Dame Silvia Cartwright, the inquiry changed the doctor-patient relationship so that patients must now provide informed consent.

Auckland District Health Board finally apologised for the experiment last month, 50 years after it began, but one legacy of the experiment by Associate Professor Herbert Green was that a generation of doctors believed cervical screening was pointless.

A National Cervical Screening Programme was rolled out in 1990 but it’s believed the human papillomavirus [HPV] vaccine, introduced in 2008 to pre-teen girls to target the virus that causes cervical, oral and now penile cancer, will be what Monday

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Society wipes the virus out. Breast cancer also remains a challenge. Rates in the Western world have increased as a direct result of women’s fertility, because pregnancy and breastfeeding are “protective features” but they are being delayed to the age of 28 to 30.

Another contributing factor is that each generation is a little heavier than the last, by 3 to 5 kilograms, and that is largely down to the types of food women are consuming and a lack of exercise.

One in nine Kiwi women will get breast cancer now and 650 will die each year, compared with 25 men.

But in some ways women’s health is looking positive. A Kiwi woman’s life expectancy has always been higher than for New Zealand men. In 1892 it was 57 compared to 52 for men and now it is around 83, compared to 78 for men.

This is a result of better medications, advancing treatments and technology, and more education and prevention. Specialist obstetrician and gynaecologist Dr Emma Parry said the rate of teenage pregnancies in New Zealand, which used to be one of the worst in the OECD countries, had fallen significantly in recent years.

Parry believes that is due in part to full funding of an implantable progesterone contraceptive.

Jadelle is made up of two small rods, inserted by a doctor or nurse, that sit under the skin on the upper arm and release progesterone into a woman’s body for five years.

That and intra uterine devices [IUDs], the emergency contraceptive pill and teenagers delaying their first sexual encounter have all been credited with helping to halve teenage pregnancies from 2008 to last year, from 33 births per 1000 to 16 for age 15-19, according to Statistics New Zealand. “This speaks women’s rights and what’s changed in 125 years. “Because we know that when you look around the world, if you have good contraception that’s easily available to women then you change so many of the outcomes for women,” Parry said.

HFor more stories and videos from our Suffrage Anniversary coverage, go to nzherald.co.nz/ suffrage to