About Us

We deserve better is a first-of-its-kind, entirely grassroots patient-led, owned, and operated patient rights organization dedicated to educating, informing, and empowering patients and making what we believe to be essential changes to the way gynecology is practiced worldwide.   

What started as a small community created by 4 people on Reddit in 2018 has grown to 7000 members strong today and has spawned a TikTok page, a YouTube channel, a blog, and a first of its kind organization. 

We are not opposed to reproductive health care by any means, we're not even opposed to gynecology as a field of science; we are opposed to how that field of science is practiced because it's antiquated, barbaric, dogmatic, and misogynistic.

From the very start, gynecology has been hand in hand with violence against women, misogyny, and racism. Unfortunately, not much has changed, and these issues are still affecting women and afab people today.

We can effectively trace this all the way back to the birth of modern gynecology in the 1800s, when the man hailed as the “father of modern gynecology” began performing horrific human experiments on Black women and children held as slaves, and throughout the decades since with a time in the 1900s in which women suspected of being sex workers were held against their will and forced to endure speculum exams to test for STDs, the invention of the pap smear in the 1940s by a greek doctor whose wife endured daily pap smears for years, the 1972 arrest and imprisonment of a feminist activist for teaching women how to view their own anatomy with a speculum and take back some of the power the speculum has stripped from us, all the way to today in which women are denied our right to informed consent far more often than we're granted it, we're expected to endure extremely painful medical procedures such as IUD insertion, biopsies in which metal rods are shoved through the cervix into our internal organs, procedures to remove abnormal cells in which part of our internal organs are cut out and burned off with only Tylenol as pain relief, and our medications are held hostage until we “consent” to medically unnecessary and often completely useless invasive exams.

In fact, one of our biggest complaints about gynecology is how unscientific it actually is.  
Take, for example, the pelvic exam. There was never any significant scientific evidence supporting pelvic exams, yet even after multiple reputable health organizations such as the American College of Physicians and the American Preventive Services Task Force came out and said there is no evidence suggesting routine pelvic exams should be performed most gynecologists still perform them regularly and continue to recommend them against all scientific evidence and organizations like the American college of obstetrics and gynecology defend the practice; with the former vice president of the ACOG going as far as to just out right say that they know the practice is not evidence based but they will continue to encourage it a as “bonding experience” between providers and patients and describe the exam as a “time of intimacy” a statement which should be absolutely revolting to any reasonable person, and others just getting right to point and asking “are you trying to bankrupt gynecology?” admitting both that routine pelvic exams were never about women's health or our scientific understanding of it, and that gynecology relies so heavily on outdated archaic practices that without them they fear bankruptcy.

The same goes for holding birth control hostage until a patient completes a pelvic exam and/or pap smear despite there being no medical reason to require those exams, the refusal to provide pain relief for many gynecological procedures, the lack of research and funding put towards reproductive health conditions, and the continued denial of things like the cervix having nerves.  

If you know that what you're doing has no scientific evidence behind it and doesn't make any logical sense, but you still continue to do it simply because of what you “believe” about it, that's closer to a religion than to a science.

Or even worse, to believe in general the exam may be unnecessary,but when *you* do it, it's somehow magically not unnecessary anymore.

That's dogma, not science.

And I don't know about you but I don't want dogma in my healthcare anymore then I want anti-science nonsense, outdated BS, or religion in my healthcare.

If gynecology actually followed the science it would be unrecognizable in comparison to what it is today. 

We Deserve Better is all about getting reproductive healthcare to the point it is unrecognizable for future generations.

Absolutely not! 

While we do believe in the absolute importance of informed consent and making one's own decision regarding all healthcare, we are not anti-science or anti-medicine, and we believe that vaccines are safe, effective, and lifesaving. 

In fact, one of our biggest complaints with gynecology is how unscientific it is as a field of medicine.

Many of the practices still employed in gynecology today are extremely outdated, dogmatic, and not supported by any real evidence. Things like the routine pelvic exam that we're often told is essential for our health in actuality is little more than a ritual. 

Like throwing salt over your shoulder, or checking whether or not you locked the front door exactly three times.

There's nothing scientific about that.

There's nothing evidence based about that.

Despite how often the accusation that We Deserve Better is anti-science gets thrown around by those critical of us, I would argue that we're more science based than gynecology. 

We can actually provide sources for our claims beyond just telling you "it's clinic policy". 

We've actually read the latest literature unlike most of the gynecologists out there still requiring a medically unnecessary pelvic exam to prescribe the pill. And that literature spoke volumes about how truly behind the times gynecology is.

We believe that trans rights are human rights.

Trans women are women.

Trans men are men. 

Gender affirming care is life-saving healthcare.

And that the gender we're assigned at birth and chromosomes don't define who we are, how we express ourselves, and who we want to become. 

We want to make it abundantly clear that we stand with trans people.