Delicate Condition

by Danielle Valentine

I didn’t know this then, but the truth is there’s no such thing as an uncomplicated pregnancy. We all give something up in exchange for our babies. Nearly everyone on this planet was welcomed by the sounds of a woman screaming.

Io wished people would stop telling women they should be grateful for their suffering instead of trying to help them with it.

“You know how, in old fairy tales, the women are always having to make some horrible exchange to get pregnant? I keep thinking about what I would exchange. Or I guess, what I wouldn’t exchange. And the answer is nothing. I would pay any price if it meant I got to be a mother.”

Couldn’t someone have come up with a better method for figuring this out in the last hundred years or so? Sometimes it felt like the continuation of our species was an ongoing experiment being performed on the backs of women. Or on our wombs.

Dr. Hill was always telling me that some discomfort during pregnancy was perfectly normal. It had gotten to the point where the two things were linked in my mind: the discomfort was the baby, and the more I suffered, the healthier the baby would be. This wasn’t just me being a martyr. Pregnancy books all said women who experienced morning sickness were less likely to have a miscarriage. It put me in the bizarre position of hoping for the pain, the nausea.

“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.”

Siobhan had a (rather famous) ex, and when I asked if they still spoke, she looked at me like I’d asked whether she was still in touch with her third-grade teacher and said, “Now why would I want to do that, honey?”

His wedding band had caught the light while he was mopping up the blood on the insides of my thighs, drawing my eye. It made me think of Cora, how he’d told Cora he was going to leave me if the IVF didn’t work, how he’d left Adeline because she hadn’t agreed to bear his children. We were just wombs to him, just things. He didn’t love us. He didn’t even see us as people.

I thought about what it would be like to live the rest of my life in blissful ignorance, never knowing what I’d traded to get my daughter back. Never knowing what she was.

Why don’t doctors tell women about these symptoms? Is it because they think we’ll stop having babies?

Unfortunately, confusion is a common theme throughout pregnancy. Despite the fact that women have been giving birth for hundreds of thousands of years, there’s still a lot we don’t know.

The general consensus is that it’s unethical to study the effects of drugs on a pregnant woman. But lack of progress into alternative methods of testing means there’s little research to go on.

Throughout the history of medicine, women have been included in far fewer medical studies, less research and fewer drug trials than men have been.

the most horrifying part of Anna’s experience isn’t what happens to her physically, but how the people around her react: how her doctors dismiss and ignore her, expecting her to suffer through her pain for the good of her baby without any concern for whether her body can handle it; how her husband assumes she’s either making up or exaggerating her symptoms.

The tendency to assume that women can’t be trusted to accurately convey their symptoms comes from the historical diagnosis of “hysteria,” which was once thought to be a medical condition said to only affect women. Doctors were taught that women were inherently liars, unreliable, or hysterical hypochondriacs. In some cases, they were even believed to be possessed. And these beliefs have persisted, even after the diagnosis of hysteria was proven to be nonsense.

Doctors don’t understand our bodies, they don’t believe us about our symptoms, and they ignore us when we try to tell them we’re in pain. Is it really any surprise then that women look for answers elsewhere? Faith in alternative and homeopathic medicines, such as acupuncture and aromatherapy

People conveniently forgot the medical system that abandoned them. But would women turn to these things so frequently if they felt they were being listened to?

I hope that men will read this book and feel a little less comfortable with women’s suffering. I hope we stop assuming that pain is a woman’s birthright and start trying to find a way to ease the burden, just a little. Childbirth is not, after all, something that only affects women—it affects us all.