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February 19 - February 21, 2022
but we had our own experiences and instincts. We were an army fighting for sanity and information. We texted back and forth at all hours of the day and night.
Although miscarriage is very common, we rarely talk about it openly, leaving women to endure it quietly and alone, often convinced that something they did may have caused it.
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.
True female reproductive health, which is the foundation of everyone’s health, requires that the social systems in which we live allow us to make informed choices about what is best for each
“We are volcanoes,” wrote the American novelist Ursula K. Le Guin. “When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.”
“That’s what I want—to hear you erupting.”
If you want to know what to expect, it is that a lot of people will have a lot of expectations about your pregnancy and what you “should” be doing. And these expectations can break you.
Women deserve to have access to information so we can make our own educated choices—not information repackaged in the form of instructions
about what those choices should be.
Women have always grown, birthed, and raised babies with the benefit of knowledge passed down through generations of other women.
Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy—were
There is no single approach to pregnancy and childbirth that is best.
we could speak the truth: that we are all just doing the best with what we have.
65,175 babies conceived through in vitro fertilization (IVF)—a process by which eggs are harvested and sperm are collected, and insemination takes place in a petri dish—were born in the United States in 2015.
“There is no longer one dominant family form in the U.S.,”
We are all born from female bodies, and so we have all experienced birth firsthand. We were all female once, too. All humans will grow female parts unless, around the tenth week of pregnancy, hormones called androgens direct a fetus to develop testes and a penis. Female is our origin sex.
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.
Fetal health became more of a concern than maternal health.
In many cases, she found that such guidelines are based on what she describes as “overinterpretation of flawed studies.”
Without being allowed our autonomy—ownership of who we are, messiness, flaws, contradictions, and all—we can begin to fade into the background, a shadow to ourselves and our future children.
In pregnancy I didn’t quite know who I was or who I was becoming. One thing I knew, though, was that I didn’t want to lose myself.
As a society, we tend to mark mental illness, just as we do addiction, with stigma, as a character flaw.
the human placenta goes deep, infiltrating up to one hundred uterine arteries, and growing thirty-two miles of capillaries.
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.
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.
Just because science hasn’t proven something doesn’t mean people don’t know it.
“Sometimes when people are really raw, the easiest way to get through the hardest part is to stay busy,”
wasn’t about not dealing with things—you knew what was happening—but reminding yourself that the world wasn’t over. I wanted you to be able to get away from it for a little bit.”
“So many things seem filled with the intent / to be lost that their loss is no disaster.”
In reality, miscarriage ends up to 20 percent of known pregnancies—roughly 750,000 to 1,000,000 every year in the United States.
40 percent of the women surveyed who experienced a miscarriage said they felt they had done something wrong to cause their miscarriage, and 47 percent expressed feeling guilty.
“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.”
According to Swanson, the most important message to offer a patient is that she can recover and work through pregnancy loss—not that she will, or will even want to, get pregnant again.
that labor is initiated not by anything a mother does but by the fetus, which releases hormones that act upon the placenta and, in turn, the uterus.
as preferences on pain relief, what positions you’d like to use, who will be present in the birthing room, who will catch the baby, when to initiate skin-to-skin contact, and if you want to try to breast-feed immediately.
The truth is that birth is both a normal, everyday occurrence and a significant medical event. It can be many things at once. It is, for some women, a spiritual experience that connects them with a sense of the divine.
state-of-the-art, or “safe” the place you give birth is, there is also the shameful reality that the United States has the highest maternal death rate of any developed country in the world.
Black mothers are three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white mothers.
Childbirth is beautiful, but it is not pretty. It is grisly and life affirming, glorious and deadly. It requires you to open, to rip apart both physically and emotionally, and allows the scent of death to seep through those tears and fissures. Whatever form it takes, however long it takes, it is also the means to an ecstatic end.
The contractions we must endure—for hours, sometimes days—do so much more than cause pain.
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.
Research also suggests that babies born via C-section, who are more likely to experience health issues including asthma and allergies, might be at greater risk because they lack the same bacterial exposure as their vaginally born counterparts.
(Perhaps if I had known it was a possibility, I would have requested, like other mothers, to have my vagina swabbed and then rubbed on my baby’s face so she could have gotten that first dose of microbes.)
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.
When things go badly, isn’t that the time to be even more understanding and generous with our bodies, with ourselves?
She acknowledged the disappointment I might feel about birth and pointed out, without platitudes, the beauty that came from it.
that my birth experience was entirely my own—no need to compare it to anyone else’s.
there is no single experience that makes
a birth “complete” or “normal” or “right.”
Childbirth is not a zero-sum game. It is a spectrum, with most people’s experiences falling somewhere in between two extremes.
