Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy

by Angela Garbes

To the world, your changing shape signals that you are a pregnant person first and yourself second. You become a repository for other people’s hastily blurted thoughts, a blank screen for them to project their hopes, fears, beliefs, and instructions.

Perhaps the darkest side of pregnancy is being routinely infantilized by people who offer their advice and opinions on how to be the best possible host/incubator for your baby.

Fetal health became more of a concern than maternal health.

In 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released an educational flyer for health-care professionals titled “Drinking Too Much Can Have Many Risks for Women.”

And men??????

It is, apparently, every woman’s job to avoid pregnancy, sexual assault, and sexually transmitted disease. By not drinking.

This is often the first time in our lives that our choices physically impact the well-being of another human being. That is sobering.

The placenta does not, technically, belong to the mother. Our bodies may create it, but it is part of the developing child, which means it is also made up of 50 percent genetic material from the father.

A healthy placenta is directly tied to a healthy pregnancy.

Placental abnormalities such as placenta previa, in which the placenta attaches low in the uterus and covers the cervix; placenta accreta, in which the entire placenta or parts of the organ penetrate too deeply into the uterine wall and cannot detach after birth; and preeclampsia, in which the organ’s blood vessels do not form properly, leading to high blood pressure and dangerous conditions late in pregnancy, can cause difficult and frightening births, even maternal death.

It was only in 1993 that Congress passed the National Institutes of Health Revitalization Act, a law requiring that women and minorities be included in clinical trials funded by the federal government’s National Institutes of Health.

While heart disease is the leading cause of death among women in the United States, for example, less than one-third of cardiovascular clinical trial subjects are female.

Its life span is finite; it reaches maturity around thirty-four weeks, after...

That level of force accomplishes a few things: pushing a baby’s head and body downward toward the vagina, thinning and opening the cervix, and, astonishingly, transfusing the fetus with its own blood.

A full-term placenta holds about six ounces of a fetus’s blood, which is about half of a newborn’s blood volume.

During vaginal birth, a baby’s journey down the birth canal serves as its intimate introduction to its mother’s vaginal microbiome, the distinct combination of bacteria that go on to help the growing human deal with infection, train its immune system, and help it process food.

Simkin realized then that it was not the physical act of birth itself that held the most potent memories for women, but the way they were cared for before, during, and after birth.

To produce breast milk, mothers melt their own body fat. Are you with me? We dissolve parts of ourselves, starting with gluteal-femoral fat, a.k.a. our butts and thighs, and turn it into food for our babies.

All these changes happen in preparation for lactation, which is essentially the transmutation of blood into milk. Prolactin, a hormone produced by the pituitary gland in the brain, compels alveoli cells to draw sugars, proteins, and fat from a mother’s blood so that these macronutrients can be used as the building blocks of breast milk.

It contains all the vitamins and nutrients a baby needs in her first six months of life; and it contains germ- and disease-fighting substances that help protect a baby from illness.4 Oh, and also: The nutritional and immunological components of breast milk change every day, according to the specific, individual needs of a baby.

In fact, the greatest cost of breast-feeding, which is invisible to most people besides parents, is time (and, oh, bodily autonomy).

mother’s milk—a substance that is simultaneously food, medicine, and signal—in

Nutritionally, breast milk is a complete and perfect food, an ideal combination of proteins, fat, carbohydrates, and nutrients.

Colostrum, the thick golden liquid that first comes out of a woman’s breasts after giving birth (or sometimes weeks before, as many freaked-out moms-to-be will tell you) is engineered to be low in fat but high in carbohydrates and protein, making it quickly and easily digestible to newborns in urgent need of its contents. (It also has a laxative effect that helps a baby pass its momentous first poop, a terrifying, black, tar-like substance called meconium.)

Mature breast milk, which typically comes in a few days after a woman has given birth, is composed of 3 to 5 percent fat and an impressive list of minerals and vitamins: sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium, phosphorous, and vitamins A, C, and E. Long-chain fatty acids like DHA (docosahexaenoic acid, an omega-3 fatty acid) and AA (arachidonic acid, an omega-6 ...

The principal carbohydrate in breast milk is lactose, a sugar that provides copious calories and energy to fuel babies’ r...

Other sugars are also present, including some 150 oligosaccharides (there may be even more—scientists are really just beginning to understand them) and complex chains of sugars unique to human milk (I repeat: unique to human milk). These oligosaccharides can’t be digested by infants; they exist to feed the microbes that populate a baby’s digestive system, which are a critical part of her microbiome.

Day after day, hour after hour, your infant will remind you how little you know about what you are doing. For people who are used to doing things well, this can be more than frustrating. It can start to feel like failure.

my husband and I were like a pair of slipper lobsters, worn and tired as an old pair of shoes. Our former shells were falling off and new ones were forming, all while our bodies, more tender than ever, were showing us what we were capable of.

Fetal cells have been found in Cesarean section scars, as well as other healed wounds, suggesting they play a role in maternal injury recovery.