Gabrielle Union has candidly opened up her eventual adenomyosis diagnosis and the fury she felt at it having been missed by doctors for so long.
Gabrielle Union
The 48-year-old actress had suffered multiple miscarriages when she was eventually diagnosed with the condition, where the womb lining is found in the uterus and could explain fertility problems, in 2018, after she and husband Dwyane Wade had been through several unsuccessful IVF cycles.
She said: "I was relieved at first, as I thought it was a personal failing, not a physiological challenge. Then later, having time and distance I realised that's just f***** up. There are so many people coming forward to say the same thing. And we all take it; it's the curse of being a woman. They put a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound and call it a day. Man! The patriarchy! You see how far it goes and all of the pain-free futures that are being robbed from women. It's infuriating!"
The 'Bring it On' actress also spoke out against the stigma surrounding perimenopause, a condition which most women experience before menopause hits.
She said: "It's something the vast majority of women are going to go through at some point, but for a lot of women to even say the word 'perimenopause', it ages you. Suddenly you feel like you're Old Mother Hubbard. You feel like they just put a scarlet letter on you! And we don't talk about it because we don't want to age publicly."
Gabrielle - who welcomed daughter Kaavia into the world via surrogate in 2018 - called out the issues that she feels society won't discuss.
She told Stylist magazine: "There are so many things that might happen to your body but we don't talk about them. We talk about night sweats because a man might wake up to a puddle; not the discomfort a woman might feel. Or vaginal dryness: 'Well, we've got to get a solution for that!' It's more of the things that are inconvenient to men. But who cares about our personal suffering?"
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