Many non-labor and delivery (non-L&D) OBGYN procedures require patients’ bodies to be positioned in, arguably, one of the most vulnerable ways. Patients so positioned are physically, epistemically, and emotionally at the mercy of their clinicians, so clinicians’ characters and pain management strategies during such procedures could not be more worthy of ethical investigation. Communication and analgesia approaches are clinician dependent and, thus, heavily reliant upon clinicians’ capacities to discern patients’ needs and to charitably—and as accurately as possible—interpret patients’ pain responses, and to generously construe what patients deserve from them. Expressions of gender identity, racial, ethnic, and age biases in OBGYN settings have a treacherous, violent history with long legacies and persistent influence on many patients’ experiences. This theme issue considers acute non-L&D OBGYN pain specifically; when pain of patients undergoing these procedures is addressed inadequately or callously, patients are at more risk of harm than should be socially, culturally, and professionally tolerated.

Background image by Kayla McCormick.