Women call ambulances for morning sickness because doctors still don’t take female medical complaints seriously

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Considering the popularity of the notion that women are inherently more fragile than men, it’s odd that when our “fragility” – usually actual, excruciating pain and suffering – presents itself in medical settings, we’re often left with nothing to remedy what we’re going through but a patronising instruction to “just deal with it”.

Having stomach cramps as severe as heart attacks? Wait until you have a baby, the pain will ease. Suspect your rapidly ballooning stomach and constant pain is a sign of fibroids? Sick of increasingly unbearable menopause-related migraines disrupting your life? Think again, you’re probably exaggerating.

When it comes to morning sickness, that level of ignorance is just as pronounced.

“Go home and deal with it like everyone else,” a doctor is said to have told a woman grappling with pregnancy sickness when she went to them for help, according to a 2017 midwifery journal MIDIRS. The publication also found that a meagre 34 per cent of women surveyed were given the correct information about treating extreme morning sickness.

Even more alarmingly, it was revealed today that in many cases because of misinformation of that nature, up to 20,000 ambulances a year are called to help those experiencing morning sickness. Extreme cases of pregnancy related sickness, also known as hyperemesis gravidarum (HG), often require hospitalisation, with severe symptoms ranging from low blood pressure to ketosis, a serious condition that causes a build-up of acidic chemicals in blood and urine.

But in many instances, as Roger Gadsby, lead author of the University of Warwick study, pointed out, emergency calls of this nature, and the more than £60m it has cost the NHS, could have been avoided had GPs taken their concerns into account.

Citing the need for “better advice and appropriate prescribing from healthcare professionals”, Gadsby rightly pointed out just how harmful the misrepresentation of conditions like pregnancy related sickness has been, right down to the language we associate with it.

Like “morning sickness”, as it’s often called. As if the seven in 10 pregnant women who experience it are gifted with neat, timely bouts of mild nausea at the crack of dawn and at the crack of dawn only, when in actual fact, in many cases, women dealing with HG have reported vomiting up to 50 times a day.

The idea of necessary suffering is also rather frustratingly tied to all this. For those who can get pregnant, it’s often seen as a fundamentally joyful experience. If you go by the average Hollywood depiction of what it’s like to grow a child inside you, pregnant women glow, spend their days lovingly thumbing ultrasound pictures, and indulging quirky cravings and birth plan ideas. They do not know what’s best for them because, you know, hormones. And if they claim to, doctors are – understandably, given their profession – seen as the only possible voice of reason.

There’s never room for the reality of dealing with pregnancy complications, or any reproductive health-related issues. And when there are other opportunities for professionals to let bias cloud their judgement – eg if you are a black or Asian woman, who are five and two times more likely to die from birth-related complications than white women respectively – you’re even more likely to have people wildly underestimate the urgency of your health.

Issues which – thanks to high-profile women like Kate Middleton, whose openness about HG has led to widespread discussions about the condition, or Serena Williams, who sparked conversations about childbirth mortality among black women in the US – are increasingly being discussed.

The extra burden placed on hospitals isn’t all down to errors on the part of GPs, of course, nor is it the fault of needlessly anxious pregnant women. But, as Gadsby points out: “Better management will reduce the numbers that have to go.” And part of that better management is examining what causes so many to underestimate women’s pain in the first place.