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

by Angela Garbes

Control over our own bodies is an essential freedom, but it’s one women have never been able to take for granted. We live in a society that, even as it relies on us to exist, continually conspires to remove us from our bodies and to punish us when we exercise our rights to—or not to—reproduce.

During the early twentieth century, women weren’t just driven out of the field of health care, they were also actively excluded from accessing medical education. And with that, the responsibility of caring for pregnant women shifted to men.

There is no right or wrong way to be pregnant, to become a mother, to make a family. There is only one way—your way, which will inevitably be filled with tears, mistakes, doubt, but also joy, relief, triumph, and love.

I relied on it to transport me into my old body, my body to come, other bodies, other experiences. Pregnancy connects you to so many people—past, present, and future—who have gone and will go through the same disorienting process. I tried to be as generous with myself as I would be to others. I’d tell myself that there was only so much that I could do to help this growing being along, only so much of myself that I needed to give up or change.

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. The organ—and the fetus—are both foreign to the mother’s body, yet she tolerates them, even allowing the placenta to take hold of and scramble her body’s structures.

To me, what I was losing was matter, cells—not a baby. And yet the matter, for a couple of weeks, annihilated my rational mind. In just six weeks of pregnancy, nothing in my life had really changed. And yet, as it slipped and oozed out of me and I was powerless to stop it, it was replaced by a screaming sense of loss.

“We should always take miscarriage as an absolutely normal life event,” said Swanson. “It’s a transition, part of living and dying. Every single day, your body is sloughing off fluids and cells that may be harmful to you. With miscarriage, you are entering a very natural process. The body is wise. It recognizes a pregnancy that could never be carried to term.”

For me, the most difficult part of that second pregnancy loss was attempting to make sense of so many new and entirely unrecognizable feelings. I found myself grieving someone I had never known, someone who, to be honest, I never even thought of as a person. How (not to mention why) do you mourn someone who never came into being?

I waited until I was fourteen weeks pregnant with the little being that would become my daughter before I started telling people. And even then, I was still scared. I don’t remember when exactly I let go of it, but I do know that, when I told others, it was their happiness that began to make the pregnancy seem viable and real. They seemed to have nothing but hope and belief. Perhaps it was that warmth that slowly melted my fear.

Someone once suggested that if I hadn’t lost a pregnancy, I wouldn’t have the beautiful child I have now. She was trying to make me feel better, I think, or to help me make sense of things. It was a mistake. I remember looking at her face and thinking that if I hadn’t experienced that loss, I wouldn’t be the person I am now.

As humans parted evolutionary ways with our primate cousins over millennia, our pelvises got smaller while our heads got bigger. These are just two aspects of human anatomy, but they have outsize impacts on childbirth. For the last few decades, this evolutionary hypothesis of childbirth, called the obstetrical dilemma, has provided a framework for understanding how and why childbirth—which seems like it should unfurl as an instinctual, straightforward process—has become so complex.

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.

I could look back and think about the ways my body disappointed me—and I did, a few times. But whenever I went down that road, I found that it was a dead-end street that made me feel terrible. Hating my body remains a waste of time. At some point, just for the purpose of survival, I chose, deliberately, to focus on all the things my body did right, what it did so well on my behalf. Everything it tried to do.

“It’s not how you give birth, it’s how you’re cared for that really matters,” Penny Simkin told me.

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.

The nutritional and immunological components of breast milk change every day, according to the specific, individual needs of a baby.

According to Hinde, when a baby suckles at its mother’s breast, a vacuum is created. Within that vacuum, the infant’s saliva is sucked back into the mother’s nipple, where receptors in her mammary gland decipher it.8 This “baby spit backwash,” as she delightfully described it, contains signals, information about the baby’s immune system—including any infections it may be fighting.