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

by Angela Garbes

If pregnancy and motherhood have taught me anything, it’s that I have zero interest in judging people or the choices they make. What matters to me is that we have real choices—and the information to get there.

“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.”

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.

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.

Our culture tends to think about pregnancy in terms of the limitations it places on our bodies and lives, big and small.

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.

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.

Up until very recently, government-funded research has been conducted almost exclusively by, on, and for white men. 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. 1993. Two and a half decades later, women are still underrepresented in medical research. 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.

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 forty-plus weeks of pregnancy and childbirth—going from not pregnant to pregnant and then, suddenly, from pregnant to not pregnant again—is a decidedly long and transformative process. As with birth, the binaries are extreme and bookmark the experience, but we spend most of our time in the middle. While we are there, we should exist as comfortably as possible. Care can be the buffer that supports us and fills in the gaps.

We know that breast-feeding can help children avoid problems that manifest later in life, like type 2 diabetes and high cholesterol. We also know that black people are 2.2 times more likely than white people to develop type 2 diabetes, while Native Americans are 2.8 times as likely.10 Black and Native American people have the two lowest initiation rates of breast-feeding of all racial and ethnic groups in the United States.11

What I couldn’t fully appreciate then was the knowledge I have now: that being a mother means honoring the distinct people we have always been and recognizing that, as members of a family, we’ll be finding our way apart and together, again and again, for a lifetime.

Caring for an infant is monotonous, constant, and physically demanding work. New parents should be regarded like endurance athletes or hard laborers. Your body acquires another layer of utility, albeit one besotted with emotion, and its willingness to do that is how we should regard it, first and foremost. The work is honorable; doing the work is beautiful.

Researchers found that couples who didn’t discuss parenting chores and who is in charge of which task—“unexpressed and incongruent role expectations”—had more negative feelings about their relationships. In contrast, having similar beliefs about the need to share tasks—and being clear about who is responsible for what—helped couples maintain a happier relationship amid the chaotic banality of early parenthood.

A survey published in 2016 revealed that the majority of primary care physicians didn’t screen for prolapse and that 50 percent believe that the condition is rare.5 (Meanwhile, studies show that prolapse may affect over half of all women and that some degree of prolapse is extremely common in older women.)6

For the majority of people who want to maintain full range of motion, an ACL injury is repaired by arthroscopic surgery, a modern, minimally invasive method developed to reduce pain, complications, and recovery time. As part of their ACL recovery, patients are put on a program of physical therapy that includes multiple phases of exercises that can last up to six months. This is the standard care that the roughly two hundred thousand people receive who experience an ACL injury each year. There is no such standard protocol for the treatment of pelvic floor disorders, which affect up to 1.3 million of the 4 million American women who give birth annually. The majority of ACL tears in this country occurs in men. I have a hard time believing that the discrepancy in attention and care is coincidental.