Before medicine had a word for it, language already knew. The room where a human being is assembled shares its root, in Arabic, with Mercy itself—not a metaphor bolted on afterward, but a fact buried in the bones of the word. Al-Rahman. Al-Rahim. Rahm. Three words breathing the same breath. And yet we have built an entire clinical civilization that treats this room as disposable furniture—useful while occupied, discardable once vacated. This essay is an argument against that amnesia, mounted on two fronts at once: the laboratory and the lexicon.
Let me start with a number that stopped me cold. One in three women in the United States will have their uterus removed by the age of sixty. In some Indian states the figure climbs sharply—Andhra Pradesh reports a prevalence of nearly nine percent among women aged fifteen to forty-nine, the highest in the country. Meanwhile, surgeries to remove male reproductive organs remain exceedingly rare—orchiectomy is almost always a last resort for testicular cancer, a disease that itself accounts for only about one percent of all male cancers.
Continue reading “Uterus, Utility and Unification by Sabahat Fida”
Around the age of 8, or maybe 10, I learned my aunt had had a hysterectomy. I remember visiting her house either shortly before or after the operation. I can’t remember which, and it doesn’t really matter. At the time, I don’t think I even knew what a uterus was or that I too had one. 
