The Gendered Impacts of Armageddon
Gender-specific concerns related to nuclear weapons usage, testing, and power plant accidents.
Content warning: this article will discuss sensitive topics, including but not limited to sexual violence as well as intentional and spontaneous abortion.
Last year, at the end of June, the First Meeting of States Parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons took place in Vienna. Here, they successfully adopted the Vienna Declaration and a 50-Article Action Plan to work towards a world without nuclear weapons. (More details about who the States Parties are, exactly, here.)
Both documents gesture to a need and desire to work more closely together with communities impacted by nuclear weapons, including the hibakusha of Japan and their families, and indigenous people displaced by or suffering health consequences from nuclear weapons testing, as well as communities likely to impact change, like youth groups. But in addition to a frank acknowledgement of the colonial history of weapons testing, the documents refer to, but do not define, "the disproportionate impacts [nuclear weapons] have on women and girls."
Reader, I was fascinated.
Not skeptical, but fascinated. The first ideas that came to mind were expansive ranges of nuclear fallout dispersed by weapons testing — how would radiation have a disproportionate impact according to gender?
While I could spend years researching this, the UN Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) had the answers I was looking for in a more reasonable timeframe. In 2014, Anne Guro Dimmen published “GENDERED IMPACTS: the humanitarian impacts of nuclear weapons from a gender perspective” [sic] as part of the ‘Vienna Papers’. Three of her key takeaways:
Using a gender perspective ‘adds a layer’ to understanding the effects of nuclear weapons on humans. [This feels like a given.]
Women are biologically more vulnerable to harmful health effects of ionizing radiation than men.
Social effects of nuclear weapons are gendered, women often being the ones most affected in relation to psychological health, displacement, social stigma and discrimination.
Let’s unpack this.
People with uteruses, on average, are biologically more vulnerable to harmful health effects of ionizing radiation
This is the part that sounded insane.
Ionizing radiation, if this sounds like an unfamiliar term, is simply defined as a type of radiation with enough energy to remove an electron from an atom or molecule, causing it to become ionized. This is how radiation leads to chemical changes in cells and damaged DNA, potentially increasing the risk of cancer and other health conditions in people affected by it.
According to Dimmen, in a Life Span Study of the hibakusha, or nuclear war survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the risk of developing and dying from solid cancer was nearly twice as high for women as for men. This distinction is accounted for almost entirely by ovarian and female breast cancers; rates of male breast cancer and testicular cancer were nowhere near as high. However, it appears women and girls are also more predisposed to lung and thyroid cancer.
For me, this raised more questions than it answered. Articles on the subject are shockingly vague, and often report findings with no attempted explanation for the underlying mechanism. (One short article on RadiologyInfo.org offers the mind-bogglingly insufficient line “female breasts are more sensitive to ionizing radiation than male breasts.” Case closed! This website is backed by the American College of Radiology, and the Radiological Society of North America!)
It turns out, we seem to be reaching the limits of modern medical science. As of 2014, one doctor answered this question on behalf of Specialists in Radiation Protection very simply: “we do not have a definite answer as to why radiation sensitivities differ between men and women.”
In his reply, he offered one possible contributing factor — the equally vague “hormonal differences” — but otherwise fell back on the overarching gendered variation of cancers among non-artificially-irradiated populations. Hormonal differences are in fact the current subject of blame for why women experience breast cancer at higher rates than men. It’s not because of a greater abundance of breast cells, it’s the constant exposure to estrogen and progesterone, hormones which encourage growth. The same explanation has been posited to explain the gendered difference in thyroid cancer, which is about three times more common in women than in men in the general population. All things constant, it’s plausible that added radiation merely emphasizes the same inequality.
Wait a minute. One in three women will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime, but one in two men will be diagnosed with cancer! This is supposedly due to “an extra copy of certain protective genes” that men, on average, do not have. Does this make sense to you? It does not make sense to me.
Apparently, these protective genes are not enough to control for the extra vulnerability that reproductive tissues have to ionizing radiation, and bodies with uteruses carry more reproductive tissues, on average, than bodies with penises.
Glad we got that cleared up.
(It’s not cleared up at all.)
Let’s move on anyway.
Women are blamed for sterility or “abnormality in offspring”
Being the group of people who most often carry fetuses and give birth, women are predominantly affected by the wide variety of healthcare concerns and stigmas around exposure to radiation during pregnancy.
Among the hibakusha of Japan, people who were exposed to radiation from the American bomb while pregnant frequently suffered miscarriages, stillbirths, or premature labor. Children born after this frequently developed growth disorders or other conditions such as microcephaly. Regardless of their current health, women impacted by the bomb faced major obstacles in terms of marriage discrimination, and the daughters of other victims continue to confront the same challenges, at rates and in ways that male victims of the bomb were not subject to. Even if already married, given the rates at which sick womens’ husbands leave them, I would expect caregiving tasks to fall mostly towards women, and for women victims of nuclear weapons to be disproportionately uncared for by their partners.
Decades later, according to Dimmen’s article, regardless of societal expectation, pregnant women around Chernobyl at the time of the power plant accident were advised to pursue abortions without clear explanations as to why. Contemporary news, while undoubtedly biased, suggests the surge in abortions was real, and the World Nuclear Association cites one estimate that over one million abortions were undertaken in the Soviet Union and across Europe as a whole after the accident, following incorrect advice from doctors about radiation exposure and birth defects.
To be clear, elevated risk of miscarriage, “major malformations,” and probable growth restriction only occurs around roughly the same the pregnant person would expect to experience acute radiation syndrome, when the expected full radiation dose to the fetus is around 50 rads. (In a person, 50 rads might cause “flu-like symptoms,” but radiation sickness would not occur. When the dose to the fetus is around 50 rads, you might expect a full-body dose to the pregnant person to be around 100-200 rads.) As a Chernobyl evacuee (not a frontline worker), your expected extra radiation dose has been calculated, on average, at around 30 mSv (~3 rads), less than the amount necessary to cause possible chromosomal damage. Extra radiation doses to the general population of the most impacted countries — Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia — was about a third of this (less than 1 extra rad). In the grand scheme of atmospheric radiation, largely negligible.
While largely free from the physical effects of radiation sickness, people who feel they must pursue abortion due to some factor outside of their control often face resulting mental health repercussions, ranging from stress to chronic depression. (Research into this subject is complicated by the political attacks on reproductive rights, making reliable statistics on the prevalence of these issues hard to generate, let alone locate.) Needless to say, in the event of radiological exposure, these psychological impacts compound with other mental and physical stressors…
Gendered social effects: displacement and its toll on psychological and physical health
For some reason, women are more likely to report higher stress levels than men when surveyed after radiological disasters such as Chernobyl or the Three Mile Island accident. After Chernobyl, in a city approximately 110 kilometers away (68 miles), “mothers with children under 18…had a higher prevalence of mental health problems” than either men or women who were not mothers in the same city. One is forced to wonder whether this is due to social stigmas around discussing men’s mental health, forcing them to downplay the impact traumatizing events can have, or a unique role mothers might play as the psychological “rock” of the family. I would assume some combination of these factors is at play, among others. Women may also carry a larger psychological burden given their medically documented higher risks from radiation exposure; they are less likely and less willing to move back to sites of radiological disasters after forced evacuation.
During such forced evacuations, women are also at unique risk of sexual violence. Militaries around the world are perpetrators of horrific sexual violence, including the U.S. military with its large international presence. Evacuations in cases of disaster also notably increase rates of sexual violence and decrease the ability of dedicated institutions to prosecute or prevent it. During the several evacuations in the Marshall Islands, the UN Special Rapporteur reported widespread sexual abuse of Marshallese women by the U.S. military. In addition to suffering their mental and physical trauma, these women were then stigmatized for their experiences and faced social exclusion in their community.
In addition, within this same context, Marshallese women are specifically denied their cultural rights as the custodians of the land to pass it along to their children. As the land was seized by the United States and contaminated by nuclear testing, cultural practices of matriarchal land stewardship have been threatened and removed from their places of origin. In the event of any disaster or evacuation scenario, women are less likely to have access to appropriate assistance and have specific difficulties in exercising their rights to housing, land, and property.
And more
Cultural considerations have the potential to affect radiation risk across the gender spectrum in any direction. For example, after Chernobyl, men were more likely than women to consume foraged food, which was more heavily irradiated than average, and contributed meaningfully to their continued irradiation in the following years. Marshallese women, on the other hand, were more likely than men to consume the parts of fish which accrue disproportionate radiation (bones and organ meat), contributing to a higher radiation dose.
While it’s encouraging that the States Parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons are aware of and open to conducting gender-sensitive remediation and dialogue about the dangers of nuclear weapons, it’s obvious that work remains to figure out what that looks like, exactly. Medical science so far hasn’t caught up to the ambitions of the TPNW.
This discussion has notably omitted, among others, the experiences of Native and Black women in the southwestern United States, where additional nuclear testing was conducted; of women in Siberia and Kazakhstan, where the USSR conducted nuclear tests; and indigenous Australian women, displaced and affected by the United Kingdom’s nuclear test program. In this subject as in all things, indigenous voices speak for themselves, and I look forward to sharing their stories in a later post where they may take center stage.