SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2019 | MOTHER JONES 55GO
OP
“People have been selling snake oil for
a long time. This is just another type
of snake oil,” then–Orange County
District Attorney Tony Rackauckas
told cbs News. Goop denied any
wrongdoing, and the products re-
mained on the site, though their de-
scriptions were changed. (The
company now employs a fact-checker.)
Still, Canadian health law and policy
professor Timothy Caulfield, author
of the book Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong
About Everything?, said the settlement
sent “a powerful message” about the type
of information found on sites like Goop,
calling it “a little victory for science.”
A month later, Gunter published a
study in the journal Female Pelvic Medi-
cine and Reconstructive Surgery taking aim
at a different Goop claim made about the
jade eggs: that they were used in ancient
Chinese culture by queens and concu-
bines to “stay in shape for emperors.”
For the study, Gunter and archaeologist
Sarah Parcak analyzed online archives of
5,000 objects in four major Chinese art
and archaeology collections and found
no evidence of vaginal eggs ever being
used or recommended.
Gunter isn’t just hunting bunkum
for personal satisfaction. As she sees
it, steam douches and cleansing wipes
and quartz eggs have roots in the do-
minion that’s long been extended over
women’s bodies. In the era of Hippoc-
rates, perfumes and scents were ap-
plied to control the uterus, which was
thought to wander. In 1950s America,
Lysol scolded women for “intimate
neglect” and faulted them for cooling
marriages. “One most effective way to
safeguard her dainty feminine allure is
by practicing complete feminine hy-
giene” with Lysol douches, promised
one advertisement.
According to Chris Bobel, a profes-
sor of women’s and sexuality studies at
University of Massachusetts–Boston,
women are viewed as dirty and impure
from the day they first get their peri-
ods. “We begin with very early messages
about how your body is a problem to be
solved,” Bobel says, “and that sets up a
constant quest to fix it.” They’re also
told to stay pure in a sexual sense. In a
world where men are in charge, these
notions help dissociate women fromvague terms to try to make medically
necessary abortions harder to obtain.
The law states that it allows doctors
to “deliver the unborn child prema-
turely” to avoid a “serious health risk”
to the mother, such as the risk of death
or “substantial physical impairment of
a major bodily function.” But the law
never explicitly defines how “serious” a
risk must be, nor does it clarify whether
“deliver” means only an induction of
labor or also a surgical abortion.
Two days after the op-ed went viral,
Gunter strutted onto the stage of San
Francisco’s Sydney Goldstein Theater
in a red leather jacket and sequin-
encrusted bell-bottoms. She was there
for a live interview by the writer Ayelet
Waldman as part of the popular City
Arts and Lectures series. The packed
audience included women of all ages,
a sprinkling of men, and at least one
of Gunter’s patients. After a few jokes
about vaginal weightlifting, the in-
terview took on a more somber tone.
A conversation about the body in its
funny particulars had become a con-
versation about bodily freedom. “No
woman has benefited from learning less
about her body,” Gunter told the audi-
ence, slowing her voice to let each word
sink in. “People are writing laws that
are going to affect women and gender
minorities. We have to put a line in the
sand and say: The truth matters.” Qtheir bodies, which are seen
as valuable only to the extent
they can serve as instruments
for the larger good.
Many of our elected lead-
ers would prefer to keep
things that way. In the first
six months of 2019, US leg-
islators introduced 378 new
abortion restrictions across
the country. Many of them
ban abortion after six weeks,
or before many women know
they are pregnant. Gunter
sees parallels in how the
wellness industry and con-
servative legislators capital-
ize on stigma and confusion
to try to control women.
“It’s all the same tactics, it’s
all the same shell game,” she
says. As she sees it, the well-
ness industry is using pseudoscience
against women to take their money,
and the anti-abortion set is using pseu-
doscience against women to take their
power. And Gunter considers herself
uniquely qualified to tackle the lies of
either group.in 2017 , more than half of US women
of childbearing age lived in states with
abortion restrictions that conflict
with scientific evidence. This misuse
of science “isn’t something that’s
going away,” says Elizabeth Nash, the
Guttmacher Institute’s senior state
issues manager.
Gunter has increasingly drawn on
her expertise as an ob-gyn to speak
out against “medically illiterate” laws.
Activity in the fetal pole, a thickening
at the edge of an embryonic egg sac,
should not be described as a “heartbeat,”
she argues in one post, addressing the
flurry of “heartbeat bills” that seek to
ban abortion as early as six weeks into
pregnancy. In early June, the Guardian
updated its style guide to no longer refer
to the bills in such a manner; its post
announcing the decision quoted Gunter
and her “influential blog.”
In an op-ed published in the New
York Times on May 20, Gunter invoked
her experience performing abortions
to argue that Alabama’s abortion law—
now the strictest in the country—usedGwyneth Paltrow’s empire now includes a wellness
summit, “In Goop Health.”