Week 13 Discussion Board #3, part B (page 47 of the book)

"But things weren't all good.  Toward the end of her treatments, Henrietta asked her doctor when she's be better so she could have another child.  Until that moment, Henrietta didn't know that the treatments had left her infertile. 
Warning patients about fertility loss before cancer treatment was standard practice at Hopkins, and something Howard Jones says he and TeLinde did with every patient.  In fact, a year and a half before Henrietta came to Hopkins for treatment, in a paper about hysterectomy, TeLinde wrote:
'The psychic effect of hysterectomy, especially in the young, is considerable, and it should not be done without a thorough understanding on the part of the patient [who is] entitled to a simple explanation of the facts [including] loss of the reproductve function...It is well to present the facts to such an indivisual and give her ample time to digest them...It is far better for her to make her ow adjustent before the operation than to awaken from the anaesthetic and find it a fait accompli.'"
I think there was a lot of both sexism and racism in the 1950's in the South, and I think Henrietta Lacks was seen as less than the keenly intelligent and common-sense-rich person she was.  I think the physicians must have left the fact of the sterilizing effects of hysterectomy out when advising Lacks, either out of oversight or wilful omission of facts that would discourage Lacks from seeking treatment, since she was a poor black woman with five children already. 

My questions for this passage are:
1.) Would history have been drastically different if Lacks had chosen not to pursue surgical treatment for her cancer?
2.) If there had been an informed consent law in the 1950's regarding hysterectomies, would the "appendectomies" referred to in Chapter 6 have happened at all?  Would poor black women be able to own their bodies?  And what if a poor black woman wanted to terminate a pregnancy or voluntarily have a procedure done which would stop her from becoming pregnant again?  Would men tell her no, just to exert their power over her race and class and sex?   Or would they have been understanding of her need for birth control that her husband couldn't circumvent?