Unrelenting Gynecological Conflict: Isn't It Time We All Got Along?

Abstract

The Purists Over the past twenty-five years, a rupture has emerged between what I will term ‘gynecological purists’ and ‘gynecological futurists’. Members of the orthodox camp (the ‘purists’) maintain the existence of the uterus, the reality of oophorectomy, and, ultimately, the hope that we shall all one day die and be admitted to the RCOG. The futurists reject each of these three claims, offering instead the vision of a bleak universe in which there is no uterus, no possibility of oophorectomy, and nothing on the other side of death. In this paper, I will argue that the purists and the futurists represent two sides of the same coin, though they fail to recognise the fact. While gynecologists have spent the past two-and-a-half decades debating the eternal, I have been constructing a new branch of gynecology which returns to more central questions: how are we to live? Is there such a thing as truth? And, if so, can we know it?