Women at risk. Please vote today and make a difference.

Breaking News! I received an e-mail on this from Bust dot com:

Now – August 31: Vote for the independent documentary: At Your Cervix

This is important news so please spread the word. Ask your family, your doctors, your neighbors and your co-workers to help promote this film. If you feel comfortable doing so, please send a link to everyone in your address book. Here is how you can be involved.

At Your Cervix is a documentary with the goal of improving pelvic exams for women. The film was chosen as one of 8 finalists from over 100 ideas on Ideablob.com. This film is now in the finals and this is your last chance to vote for the film to receive the Grand Prize of $10,000. The filmmakers need every possible vote so tell everyone who cares about the women in their lives about the importance of improving pelvic exams and the rights of women.

Personally, I was nine when I began menstruating and I won’t discuss my pelvic exam experiences. I will tell you that it was fodder for therapy. Please Vote for At Your Cervix now. I haven’t yet seen the film but the preview and the information available on their website already have me shaking. This could be revolutionary.

From the filmmakers:

The documentary At Your Cervix explores the connection between the way medical and nursing students are taught pelvic exams and the reality that most women experience them as painful and disempowering. The film breaks the silence around unethical methods used by medical and nursing schools to teach students how to perform pelvic exams; the most egregious being on unconsenting, anesthetized women. The film highlights the Gynecological Teaching Associates, women who teach exams using their own bodies.

Help us start a movement to end the exploitation of vulnerable patients, to demand transparency in medical education and to improve painful exams.
See our trailer at www.atyourcervixmovie.com.

We will use $10,000 to pay for editing costs, color correction, a sound mix, our composer and other post-production costs. This film has been an absolute labor of love and a grassroots effort to change a system that puts women’s bodies at risk, humiliates and disregards patients, and teaches students that it’s not important to get informed consent. We need funds to finish this film, get it out into the world and create change. Post production is costly and the only thing holding us up is lack of finishing funds. Please support this very important project! Vote At Your Cervix and contribute to conversations about how pelvic exams can be more respectful and comfortable.

And this:

About the Project:

“Uncomfortable”; “Humiliating”; “Traumatic”; “Scarring”–words women too often use to describe pelvic exams. Most of the 90 million U.S. women who get pelvic exams think they are supposed to hurt. Women show disbelief when told that if done correctly on a healthy woman, pelvic exams should be pain-free.

The documentary, At Your Cervix, enters U.S. medical and nursing schools and breaks the silence around the unethical ways in which medical and nursing students learn to perform pelvic exams. These practices—which include nursing students being required to perform exams on each other in front of faculty and medical students “practicing” on unconscious, unconsenting patients—lead directly to the reality that most women find pelvic exams to be humiliating and painful. The existence of these egregious practices are challenged in the film by highlighting an ethical and more effective way of teaching the pelvic exam that has existed for nearly 30 years: the work of the Gynecological Teaching Associates (GTA) of New York City, in which the “patient” herself is the teacher.

Emphasis mine.

Click the red letters for more information on Gynecological Teaching Associates.

Again I ask that you please click this link and VOTE today. There are other films with more votes so please, send a link to this blog post, or send a link to the voting page as soon as possible. Voting ends Sunday, August 31, 2008.

Are there any experiences you want to share about this subject? Feel free to be anonymous. That would be completely understandable. I am very very glad to know that there are people out there who are even interested in this subject and now I could cry, just knowing that this film is being made.