Delicate Condition

by Danielle Valentine

The things that made you lucky could also be the things that made you suffer. Io wished people would stop telling women they should be grateful for their suffering instead of trying to help them with it.

Sometimes it felt like the continuation of our species was an ongoing experiment being performed on the backs of women. Or on our wombs.

“I’ve always hated how people separate women who want kids from women who don’t, like we’re two separate species. It’s infuriating how people insist on defining cis women’s entire lives by this one choice.”

He might diagnose miscarriages every single day, but unless he’d carried a life for months only to have it die, he couldn’t possibly know whether what I was feeling was real or not.

These doctors always seemed to think women’s emotions were things to be hidden and locked away and fixed.

I stumbled back into the bedroom, wondering if a woman has ever calmed down after a man told her to.

My favorite quote from the book