Jennifer Lang recently published an open letter as an OB-GYN who supports women who seek alternative, holistic, and awakened care. She has authored two books, “Consent: The New Rules for Sex Education” and “The Whole 9 Months: A Week-by-week Pregnancy Nutrition Guide.” Jennifer Today she speaks on her journey from ‘surgical cowboy’ to an advocate for bodily autonomy, discovering embodiment through birth, empowering low income communities to screen for and treat cervical cancer, and supporting women in building personal agency within a medical system.
Bio: Jennifer Lang is a gynecological oncologist, the author of two books, the mother of three children, and a passionate force for women’s health and wellbeing. She has served women in a hospital setting, founded a non-profit to reduce cervical cancer rates, and is creating a tech start-up to assist young people in recognizing when they are too incapacitated to consent.
“We don’t have to turn over our bodily autonomy every time we walk into a doctor’s office and get up on an exam table. In fact, we should not, ever.”
“We have to remember that doctors are just people, with all their perversions, fallacies, all of it. They’re just people. We can never just put our bodies and our lives, blindly and unquestioningly, into someone else’s hands.”
Resources: https://consentthebook.com and @drjenniferlang on IG
What She Shares:
- Her pathway through medical school and into a more connected, embodied form of care eventually leaving her surgery practice
- How her nonprofit, Cure Cervical Cancer, empowers low-income communities to prevent cervical cancer
- Her path as a wife, mother, and now through an expansion in her family and coming out to her family
What You’ll Hear:
- Becoming intimately educated in birth through living it
- Choosing homebirth after working as a hospital OB-GYN
- The challenges of maintaining your own health as a med student and practicing doctor
- Finding ways to bring embodied learning and reverence into anatomy education
- Experiencing paradigm shift through daily HypnoBirthing meditations
- From planning for a hospital birth to having a blissed-out water birth
- Recognizing the need for quiet, dark, supported birth and offering this in a surgical setting
- Understanding the developmental timeline of HPV to cervical cancer
- Preventing cervical cancer through extremely low cost means, without surgery
- Finding comfort and power while finding your cervix
- Knowing that you are the expert on your own body
- Working with other practitioners to offer patients a full spectrum of care
- Supporting patients in their empowered medical choices
- Working towards a single payer medical system in order to offer patients true comprehensive care
- Choosing to leave a medical practice because of the environmental toxins it produces
- Addressing the root cause of disease rather than treating personal symptoms
- Recognizing personal experiences within a medical opinion
- The transition from being re-awakened and exiting the old paradigm
- Moving through fear of change in order to live fully in your awakening
- Being a fully embodied parent as a way to support your children
- Developing a tech tool to assist teens in recognizing when they may be too incapacitated to consent
- Knowing your desires, limits, and boundaries, and being able to honor those during intimate encounters
