The Default Human
How a World Built for Men is Killing Women
Hi.
I am a woman. Due to this, I move through a world that isn’t built for my body. I am not being hyperbolic and I know I'm not alone in this. We're half the population, but let's be real: the 'default human' is still a man.
Across medicine, research, engineering, and design, men have long been treated as the baseline from which women are measured, adapted, or accommodated. We're the 'other,' the deviation, the afterthought. And that's not just some symbolic slight—it has real, life-or-death consequences for how we exist in this world.
And don't even get me started on healthcare.
Until 2016—seriously, 2016—medical research basically just ignored women. They tested everything on men and then just... gave us the same dose. The ignorance is breathtaking. Unsurprisingly, women have adverse reactions to medications at nearly double the rate of men. Our heart attacks don't present like the 'classic' ones they teach in med school, so we get sent home with Tylenol while we're actively dying. We're overdosed, underdiagnosed, and flat-out dismissed.
But the pattern doesn’t stop at life-and-death issues. That’s silly.
It’s everywhere.
The standard office temperature settings are optimized for the male metabolic rate, leaving women literally cold in their workplaces. Smartphone sizes are designed for the average male hand, making them harder for many women to use one-handed. Public restrooms are designed for male convenience, leaving women waiting in line. Most power tools are designed for male grip strength, making them less ergonomic and more dangerous for women to use. Voice recognition systems are trained predominantly on male voices, making them less responsive to female commands.
This isn't a series of unfortunate coincidences. It's a system exhibiting the symptoms of its original design. For centuries, safety equipment was designed and tested using only the average male body. The result? Women are 47% more likely to be seriously injured and 17% more likely to die in a comparable car crash. We're too frail, too small, our seatbelts don't fit right, our airbags deploy at harmful angles. Five-star safety for the average male body. For women? Four stars is the best car makers can do.
It's the predictable outcome of a system designed to fail us.
The Ultimate Irony: Ignored but Hyper-Regulated
Let’s examine the pathology of this contradiction. For generations, our bodies were deemed too complex, too variable, too “complicated” for proper study. We were excluded from trials, from design, from the very blueprint of safety. Now, those very same bodies are considered simple enough for any politician to legislate.
Our bodies were too unpredictable for crash test dummies, but not for the law. Our hormonal cycles were too messy for clinical trials, but they’re the perfect excuse to dictate our healthcare. The diagnosis is unavoidable: female bodies are a mystery to science, but a necessity for control.
The physical characteristics that got us labeled "deviant" in the lab are now being used as justification for our "correction" in the halls of power. We're not patients to be treated; we're problems to be managed.
We're not humans to be valued as equals; we're bodies to be subjugated.
The Policy Assault: The Cause of Death
Here is where the system’s design becomes lethal. We are no longer just “deviant”—we are reclassified as vessels, our bodies reduced to containers with a single state-approved function.
This is not a metaphor; it is the legal and medical reality.
Exhibit A: Adriana Smith was a 30-year-old Black nurse in Georgia who sought help for headaches in February 2025. The hospital gave her medication and sent her home.1 2 When she was rushed back, doctors found blood clots in her brain and declared her brain dead.3 1 But because she was pregnant, the hospital, under the force of Georgia’s fetal personhood law, kept her corpse on a ventilator for months against her family’s wishes, to use as a life support system for a fetus.4 5 6 This is the documented outcome of Georgia’s six-week ban: a woman’s body becomes state property after she dies.4 2 A law so cruel it has already been linked to the preventable deaths of other women like Amber Thurman and Candi Miller.
Exhibit B: The nationwide wave of preventable deaths. This is the “Conscience Rule” in action: a legal environment so toxic that women are left to die from treatable conditions, not in one state, but in many. The evidence is overwhelming. In Texas, Josseli Barnica miscarried at 18 weeks. Doctors delayed care for 40 hours out of fear of prosecution, and she bled to death. Nevaeh Crain, a 23-year-old mother, died in an emergency room after doctors waited for the fetal heartbeat to stop before they could intervene to save her from sepsis.
This is not a handful of tragedies. This is a pattern. A study in the American Journal of Public Health found abortion bans are associated with a 9.2% increase in pregnancy-associated deaths, an estimated 68 excess deaths by the end of 2023.1 By 2025, the body count was even higher, with research showing 59 additional deaths during or after pregnancy in states with bans.2 Another study found that women living in ban states are almost twice as likely to die during pregnancy, childbirth, or shortly after giving birth than women in states where abortion is legal.3 The disparity is now so stark that while maternal mortality decreased by 21% in states where abortion remained accessible, it soared in others.3
The damage doesn’t stop with the mothers. States with bans have seen 478 excess infant deaths because of these laws, with Black infants suffering an 11% increase in mortality compared to a 5% increase for white infants.4 2
These policies aren’t abstract political debates—they’re killing women and children.
Conclusion: The Cure
The system was designed on a blueprint that excluded us, and now it is regulating us to death. This is a public health emergency, and the body count is the evidence. The ferocity of the current backlash is not a sign of strength; it’s the death rattle of a status quo that knows its time is up.
Our response must be more than outrage—it must be creation. They seek to regulate us, to contain us, to reduce us to mere vessels. But they have fundamentally misunderstood what we are. We are not passive vessels.
We are the origin point.
We are the source from which life itself emerges. They can build their systems of laws and religions, but they cannot replicate our fundamental, creative power. I am not talking about a utopian fantasy; it is our physiological reality. Here is where the cure begins.
Fund the research. We must demand and fund comprehensive medical research that includes female physiology from day one. Support organizations like the Society for Women’s Health Research that are fighting to close the knowledge gap that is literally killing us.1
Elect the architects. We need to vote for lawmakers at every level—local, state, and federal—who will codify protections for reproductive healthcare and mandate inclusion in medical and safety research. Your vote is the most powerful tool for building a new system.
Support the front lines. The abortion funds and independent clinics in ban states are the emergency rooms in this war on women. They are providing lifesaving care under impossible conditions. Organizations like the National Network of Abortion Funds and the Abortion Care Network need our support to continue their work.2 3
The future is female because the alternative is continuing to try and coexist in a system that continues to fail us, ignore us, and kill us. But a slogan won't fix everything. We will not repair the system designed to harm us. The only path forward is to create a new system ourselves. Otherwise, we will keep dying in a world that was never designed for our survival.