A female who identifies as a transgender man reportedly lost a baby during a hysterectomy procedure because she did not know she was pregnant, according to a report from the Daily Mail.
The transgender person, Jesse Pohlner, 28, was four months pregnant when she underwent a full hysterectomy at Royal Women’s Hospital in Melbourne, Australia in 2021. In the surgery, Pohlner had her uterus and ovaries removed. The operation had been confirmed ten days prior.
Pohler found out that she was in the second trimester of pregnancy and told reporters that “there was no pregnancy test performed.”
“I would call it hospital negligence, their policy was to blame. The policy let my doctors down, they couldn't perform their best work,” Pohler reportedly said. The night before the operation, a nurse reportedly used a chart and asked her a series of “yes or no” questions and ruled that a pregnancy test wasn’t required.
What was scheduled to be a three-hour surgery with a one-night stay in the hospital turned into a nine-hour surgery and a week in intensive care, Daily Mail noted.
Pohler claimed: “We had no signs that I was pregnant. I thought I was having reflux and it turned out that it was morning sickness.”
Kellie-Jay Keen, a women’s rights activist, pointed out on Twitter that the transgender “lunacy” leads to “real harm.”
No one thought to do a pregnancy test on this woman before extracting her womb. This is what trans activists have campaigned for isn't it? utter lunacy that leads to real harm. https://t.co/WPVbX77xvq
— Kellie-Jay Keen (@ThePosieParker) August 9, 2023
In 2019, the Associated Press reported that a female who identified as a man arrived at a hospital with “severe abdominal pains.” The nurse reportedly did not consider it an emergency. But, turns out, the woman was pregnant, in labor, and delivered a stillborn.
“The point is not what’s happened to this particular individual but this is an example of what happens to transgender people interacting with the health care system,” Dr. Daphna Stroumsa of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, wrote of the incident in the New England Journal of Medicine.
“He was rightly classified as a man” in the medical records and appears masculine, Stroumsa added. “But that classification threw us off from considering his actual medical needs.”