Upwards of 80% of OBGYNs are women. Saying that none of these women care about other women, that they went into a field that specializes in caring for women’s health without caring about women, is an extraordinary claim.

I think what we’re seeing here is not at all a lack of caring but a mismatch in expectations vs reality. Many women who receive an IUD report some of the worst pain they’ve felt in their entire life. At the same time, it is a routine outpatient procedure and a specialist doctor can perform thousands of IUD insertions over the course of her career. Do we expect this doctor to react with the same intensity and outpouring of empathy every single time? Or would it be more reasonable to expect that she’d get used to seeing her patients in pain and be numbed by the experience? Compassion fatigue is a real and extremely common phenomenon. Furthermore, I would expect that a doctor who is unduly influenced by the pain of their patients may be compromised in their ability to perform under pressure.

As for the procedure itself, my understanding is that the majority of the pain is not caused by the tools but by the cervix reflexively producing intense cramps in an effort to expel a foreign object: the IUD. There’s not a whole lot that can be done about that besides giving the patient some Midol and a day off work to rest.