Rejecting sterilized culture to embrace the messiness of creation has got to be the most urgent (and least acknowledged) challenge we face. Thank you for plotting it out so eloquently. Wishing you good health and vibrancy in this pregnancy.
I've followed you for a while on Instagram (since 2022 or so ?) and was so excited when you opened your Substack. Your writings and musings on femalness, fertility and the current cultural paradigms have shocked me in a good way (i had never read anything like it) and inspired me more than you'll never know. They helped me immensely to navigate the welcoming of my first born daughter in March of this year.
Just wanted to say that the song of continuance lives on within your children and your readers !
Reading this comment was such a gift, Alice! Thank you for sharing these feelings with me and congratulations on your sweet daughter. It is tremendously encouraging to hear such graces from sweet friends and readers like you! ♥️♥️♥️
"When I bent to the will of the men I was dating and chose to abort those two babies, I failed to understand that not only was I a casualty of personal, relational coercion—myself and those babies were casualties of cultural coercion. I do not say this to absolve myself of my part in those choices, I say this to give context to the bigger picture in which many women like myself have been involved in these situations. I do think there is an element of coercion in every abortion"
So beautifully put! I'm G2P1. I've talked about this with a few former & current rad moms, but the abortion I had at 22 was most definitely cultural and relational coercion. No one supports poor, young, unmarried women in having a child they didn't plan. I certainly thought an abortion was the right thing to do. I was a cashier at a gas station, and I remember throwing up into the trash can in the back room during one of my shifts, only to come back to the register and help a customer who was pregnant, happy and had a family. The ache I felt inside is something I will never forget. It was a mixture of jealousy that she had a life in which she was "allowed" to have her baby, and just a deep, profound sadness that I wasn't in that place. I remember telling myself that I was sad about the abortion because of pregnancy hormones, but the truth is that I'm still sad, 14 years later. I realize now that I was mourning my child in the gas station I was working at. That is deeply unsettling to me, and I wish anyone would have said "it's okay to have your baby even though it's going to be hard". But in sterility culture, no one actually cares about what the mother wants to do about her unplanned baby.
Oh Sarah, thank you for sharing this for myself and others to read. I remember feeling the exact same thing about the “allowed” part of it all. I had very low self esteem at the time and considered myself an addict and addict only and talked myself into the idea that I was giving the babies mercy in my choices, when in reality I could have gotten help and grappled my way out of it (which I did do, only later). I didn’t see the help though, and I all of the voices coming at me told me that there was no way, that it was impossible etc. I look back and know my ex just wanted to have our partying uninterrupted and he also was so possessive that I think he was actually jealous of any love I would have for a child that could be greater than my love for him. Which is so sick. I’m so sorry you had that experience at the gas station and I am right here with you ♥️
Pregnancy was the first time I was read as “feminine” by other women and treated accordingly - having been shut out of that category by the girls who braided hair, knit sweaters, and lay down when they bled. Those womanly graces, even something as simple as painting my nails, never came easily to me. I kept my nails short so I could play guitar. I’ve been taught to knit three times and promptly forgot what I was taught each time. I get this from my mother - for all her homeschool, SAHM ways, she once admitted to me that she would probably have been that weird witch in the village, and I her weird daughter. She continually forgot to turn off the stove after dinner was ready. I think of her with her head in a book - my enduring memory.
The weird ones, the ones shut out of womanhood by other women (the ones who so carefully police the boundaries of acceptable femininity), we also have babies, did you know? And we find that the bloodiness of it all suits our weirdness, in fact feels a bit like a second skin, it feels like something we were born to. Every baby is a sojourner, a passer-through, a stranger; and who is better positioned to see that and greet these little souls?
Congratulations! So happy for you as a new reader who has completely fallen in love with your writing.
This is the exact nuance and terminology missing from the current ‘my body my choice,’ ‘women’s rights being taken away’ conversation. Sterility culture is all around us & we’ve been trained to look at it through the distorted lens of ‘freedom.’
Thank you so much and thank you for reading! I agree that the black and white nature of pro-choice versus pro-life narrative just simply does not do justice to the complexity of what is a very nuanced reality.
“When I bent to the will of the men I was dating and chose to abort those two babies, I failed to understand that not only was I a casualty of personal, relational coercion—myself and those babies were casualties of cultural coercion. I do not say this to absolve myself of my part in those choices, I say this to give context to the bigger picture in which many women like myself have been involved in these situations. I do think there is an element of coercion in every abortion, whether it is related to a boyfriend or angry mother or not.”
I think the coercion element (whatever the source) is just woefully underrepresented in the abortion discourse, when in reality it is truly one of the biggest contributing factors.
Thank you for putting into words the sacred mystery of feminine procreativity. It’s something I’ve been in awe of since I was a preschooler, when while going potty I discovered I had a “baby hole”, as my mother wisely termed it. Growing up I was never satisfied with “happily ever after” - I knew instinctively that the true happily ever after was bound up in the fruit of love, not just love itself. As a young adult I set my cap on becoming a midwife in order to honour and safeguard what was to me the most sacred of human experiences. Unfortunately it was a dream which was soon beaten down by my distaste for the politics around supporting abortion and FGM, and by my frailty which prevented me from working the hours necessary. Poor health has long delayed my dream of becoming a mother myself, but now, married to a man I love who wishes for a family alongside me, I dream of continuing the song of which you write.
I was also a teenager in the early aughts, and it's incredible to realize so many women are recovering from the same propaganda.
I grew up being told I could do "anything a man could do", and the constant recitation had an underlying message: "the only worthwhile achievements are traditionally masculine".
Yes it is a phenomenon I am having mirrored back to me nearly every time I share any personal life anecdotes. The intentions were often good, but the execution and the true message were not, unfortunately.
Emily, you weave so much into your beautiful-and-punchy essays. <3
And, I am also in the second trimester (17 weeks) with our fourth child. So the descriptions of quickening were particularly special, as that's what's been on my own mind in recent weeks. It's such a wild and special experience every time.
I really appreciate you writing this piece. The mainstream discussion of abortion as healthcare is woefully inadequate with no allowance for the profundity of carrying a growing life within our bodies. Life is truly sacred and that's why it can't be boiled down to "women's bodily autonomy" or "no bodily autonomy for women." We are the life-givers, the birth keepers, and we gestate and feed all of humanity.
I've been a third party participant to many abortions. Never been part of the act directly, but indirectly as a care coordinator, ultrasound machine operator, telephone triage call taker, or as a nurse on the unit when someone was having a termination. The only tagline take away I have is Abortion is Sad. It just is. Two of my close friends had abortions and it's basically The Unspeakable among us because of how tragic the circumstances were and how internally devastated both friends were by the experience, despite it being "their body, their choice."
I'd love to see your work be more widely discussed! Your perspective is so 🎯.
Thank you. I think in terms of autonomy, women simply must come to terms with the absolute fact that if we are fertile and having sex with fertile men, there very likely will be a time when some of our bodily autonomy must be balanced with the body of another. This starts with actually properly educating young women of course. I think too many of us grew up with this idea that we had so much control over reproduction and that it is a natural right for us to have that control that it becomes second nature to think that any mishaps in that relationship of control must be swiftly and effectively dealt with and that that is just how it is. The issue is that we don’t always have control and when those mishaps happen, we have to be able to grapple with the reality of what is happening within our bodies, not just push it away. I have also been on the more clinical side of this as well and yes, Abortion is Sad. That is the truth. It is a decision that always comes with some consequences, whether they are recognized or not, they are there, living in our bodies. I want women to become more pro-prevention and pro-bodily knowledge over pro-choice or pro-life. There is simply just so much more to it.
Thank you for your last point here as well, it is so encouraging.
Congratulations! I’ve evolved so much in my thinking on this throughout the years, how we view reproduction has a burden and something to be afraid of. How I let my own views be determined by society, culture, men, even women in my family. I won’t be this way with my daughter. I love to way you talk about pain and discomforts place in change as well. So so good.
Thank you Morgan. I think many of our experiences surrounding these most important topics tend to really mirror one another’s as a result of where culture has been for decades now, but I do have a lot of faith in the fact that so many women seem to really have experienced a sea change about these same topic sun recent years.
First of all, congratulations on your pregnancy, what a blessing!
I was very moved by your text and I wholly agree on what you said about cultural coercion disguised as "freedom". One of my dear friends had an abortion around the same time I was pregnant. She was in her thirties, with a steady boyfriend, money, no addictions or health problems. She told me this was her free choice and hers alone, she was doing it because "it wasn't the right time". Yet over the years, she's said some things that didn't sit right with me. How all her friends had told her it would ruin her artistic career. How her (now ex) boyfriend had been callous and unsupportive. How she was lucky she could have it done very quickly because if she'd had to wait a week or two longer, she wouldn't have had the emotional strength to go through with it.
This breaks my heart. I certainly don't see all women who have abortions as helpless victims with no free will - and you say so yourself very eloquently - but it's pure hypocrisy to ignore the culture around us and how it not only normalize but encourages abortions as routine, and worse, shuts down women who talk about their trauma and distress afterwards.
I have heard so many similar stories. Stories where the choice was made solely based on timing. I think the idea that we get full dominion over the timing in our lives is just another symptom of this sterility culture. Waiting for the perfect time to have babies and to get married seems to be a national pastime now, but there is no waiting for the perfect time to have fun or travel or start a career or go to school. If it is an economic or consumeristic endeavor, it is full speed ahead. If it is a relational endeavor that requires commitment and some level of sacrifice (with which comes great joy of course), it’s like “hmm…I don’t know, maybe in 5 years, maybe when I have this much money saved, maybe once I have lost 20 pounds, maybe when I get promoted, maybe after I backpack Europe” etc….these procreative, generative endeavors are simply not prioritized in a healthy way. Which leads to situations like your friend’s, where abortion is the healthcare that allows her to keep her lifestyle. Never mind the emotional and spiritual consequences, never mind that she may not be fertile enough to conceive again in the future. It’s really quite a losing premise unfortunately.
Couldn't agree more. We're in our early forties now and it's extremely unlikely she'll ever have children, because she never settled down with anyone since then (which isn't a coincidence imo). Both of us whittled away our twenties with boyfriends who were perfectly happy saying they were committed to us but unwilling to actually get married and have children, because like you say, why change anything when your life outside of work is all about parties and travels and spending money on yourself? And in a sense a vague "okay but later" is worse than an outright refusal, because it acts like a trap for a young woman who stays for fear that starting over again would delay maternity even more.
I ended up single at 31 after giving my ex-boyfriend an ultimatum. I remembered being terrified that I had missed my chance at motherhood but radically rethinking my priorities led me to meet my husband and I couldn't be happier. My friend stayed in this limbo for several more years and it eventually collapsed after the abortion. I wish there was a way to warn young women not to repress their desire to be mothers, to follow their instinct if they feel it's the right time for THEM and to find good men who have the same priority, but it would be a heck of a lot easier if society didn't do its damnedest to convince them of the opposite.
Congratulations, and thanks for the thoughtful essay. I like how your writing pushes at the limits of things that are are not usually put into words.
Pregnancy and childbirth is a great mystery to me, even though I used all my mental powers to understand what was happening to me and make conscious choices around fertility. I guess that’s why it is a mystery, because I tried everything to de-mystify it, and the experience (X2) was so much bigger than anything my conscious mind could comprehend about it.
Also, for me, it was so hard, and so easy, all at the same time. Getting pregnant was very difficult, but the two times I am aware I was pregnant I had two healthy babies. (I say “aware” because I can think one or two times I *might* have had an early miscarriage but I was not an early tester, so if so I never knew). I also had zero experience with babies before having my own, so I kind of wondered if I would be terrible at it, but it didn’t matter, at all. In fact going in with no preconceptions (lol, pun intended) was probably an asset. I did have help, support and advice when I wanted it (I.e. around breastfeeding) but not people imposing their ideas on me. And then a year after my second daughter, early menopause, yay! Sub fertility was brutal in many ways but completely eliminated decision making around timing or as it turned out, the number of children. It also neatly eliminated most ART because ART did not work (something I am hugely grateful for IN HINDSIGHT).
Most of the conversations around “reproductive choice” and “control” strike me as tone deaf. Of course people have wildly different experiences from me, and are faced with different decisions. But the most profound lessons I learned are that I don’t have conscious control over a lot of things, and letting go of the assumption I could or should was where the peace and freedom was.
I replied to this yesterday but it looks like it never posted, I apologize. Firstly I wanted to say thank you of course ♥️I think many women have tried to arm themselves with knowledge in the procreative process only to find that knowledge only goes so far, and in a way, it is just another form of trying to control the situation which, like you say here, we simply can’t. Reproduction is a space within the human experience where we absolutely lose some control, and I think in realizing that this is okay, we then can actually gain a more complete understanding of what it is to be human.
Rejecting sterilized culture to embrace the messiness of creation has got to be the most urgent (and least acknowledged) challenge we face. Thank you for plotting it out so eloquently. Wishing you good health and vibrancy in this pregnancy.
Thank you Ginny! I wholeheartedly feel this expression with every part of me, and appreciate your words summing it up so well!
Dear Emily,
Congratulations for your pregnancy !
I've followed you for a while on Instagram (since 2022 or so ?) and was so excited when you opened your Substack. Your writings and musings on femalness, fertility and the current cultural paradigms have shocked me in a good way (i had never read anything like it) and inspired me more than you'll never know. They helped me immensely to navigate the welcoming of my first born daughter in March of this year.
Just wanted to say that the song of continuance lives on within your children and your readers !
Reading this comment was such a gift, Alice! Thank you for sharing these feelings with me and congratulations on your sweet daughter. It is tremendously encouraging to hear such graces from sweet friends and readers like you! ♥️♥️♥️
Congratulations on the pregnancy!
"When I bent to the will of the men I was dating and chose to abort those two babies, I failed to understand that not only was I a casualty of personal, relational coercion—myself and those babies were casualties of cultural coercion. I do not say this to absolve myself of my part in those choices, I say this to give context to the bigger picture in which many women like myself have been involved in these situations. I do think there is an element of coercion in every abortion"
So beautifully put! I'm G2P1. I've talked about this with a few former & current rad moms, but the abortion I had at 22 was most definitely cultural and relational coercion. No one supports poor, young, unmarried women in having a child they didn't plan. I certainly thought an abortion was the right thing to do. I was a cashier at a gas station, and I remember throwing up into the trash can in the back room during one of my shifts, only to come back to the register and help a customer who was pregnant, happy and had a family. The ache I felt inside is something I will never forget. It was a mixture of jealousy that she had a life in which she was "allowed" to have her baby, and just a deep, profound sadness that I wasn't in that place. I remember telling myself that I was sad about the abortion because of pregnancy hormones, but the truth is that I'm still sad, 14 years later. I realize now that I was mourning my child in the gas station I was working at. That is deeply unsettling to me, and I wish anyone would have said "it's okay to have your baby even though it's going to be hard". But in sterility culture, no one actually cares about what the mother wants to do about her unplanned baby.
Oh Sarah, thank you for sharing this for myself and others to read. I remember feeling the exact same thing about the “allowed” part of it all. I had very low self esteem at the time and considered myself an addict and addict only and talked myself into the idea that I was giving the babies mercy in my choices, when in reality I could have gotten help and grappled my way out of it (which I did do, only later). I didn’t see the help though, and I all of the voices coming at me told me that there was no way, that it was impossible etc. I look back and know my ex just wanted to have our partying uninterrupted and he also was so possessive that I think he was actually jealous of any love I would have for a child that could be greater than my love for him. Which is so sick. I’m so sorry you had that experience at the gas station and I am right here with you ♥️
I was a well-off professional woman when I had
Pregnancy was the first time I was read as “feminine” by other women and treated accordingly - having been shut out of that category by the girls who braided hair, knit sweaters, and lay down when they bled. Those womanly graces, even something as simple as painting my nails, never came easily to me. I kept my nails short so I could play guitar. I’ve been taught to knit three times and promptly forgot what I was taught each time. I get this from my mother - for all her homeschool, SAHM ways, she once admitted to me that she would probably have been that weird witch in the village, and I her weird daughter. She continually forgot to turn off the stove after dinner was ready. I think of her with her head in a book - my enduring memory.
The weird ones, the ones shut out of womanhood by other women (the ones who so carefully police the boundaries of acceptable femininity), we also have babies, did you know? And we find that the bloodiness of it all suits our weirdness, in fact feels a bit like a second skin, it feels like something we were born to. Every baby is a sojourner, a passer-through, a stranger; and who is better positioned to see that and greet these little souls?
This is exactly what I was getting at in this piece. We all are part of this feminine heritage, whether one is read as feminine or not.
Congratulations! So happy for you as a new reader who has completely fallen in love with your writing.
This is the exact nuance and terminology missing from the current ‘my body my choice,’ ‘women’s rights being taken away’ conversation. Sterility culture is all around us & we’ve been trained to look at it through the distorted lens of ‘freedom.’
Thank you so much and thank you for reading! I agree that the black and white nature of pro-choice versus pro-life narrative just simply does not do justice to the complexity of what is a very nuanced reality.
“When I bent to the will of the men I was dating and chose to abort those two babies, I failed to understand that not only was I a casualty of personal, relational coercion—myself and those babies were casualties of cultural coercion. I do not say this to absolve myself of my part in those choices, I say this to give context to the bigger picture in which many women like myself have been involved in these situations. I do think there is an element of coercion in every abortion, whether it is related to a boyfriend or angry mother or not.”
It seems that way to me too.
I think the coercion element (whatever the source) is just woefully underrepresented in the abortion discourse, when in reality it is truly one of the biggest contributing factors.
Thank you for putting into words the sacred mystery of feminine procreativity. It’s something I’ve been in awe of since I was a preschooler, when while going potty I discovered I had a “baby hole”, as my mother wisely termed it. Growing up I was never satisfied with “happily ever after” - I knew instinctively that the true happily ever after was bound up in the fruit of love, not just love itself. As a young adult I set my cap on becoming a midwife in order to honour and safeguard what was to me the most sacred of human experiences. Unfortunately it was a dream which was soon beaten down by my distaste for the politics around supporting abortion and FGM, and by my frailty which prevented me from working the hours necessary. Poor health has long delayed my dream of becoming a mother myself, but now, married to a man I love who wishes for a family alongside me, I dream of continuing the song of which you write.
I hope so hard for you that you are able to fulfill your heart’s wishes. I love what you said about the meaning of “happily ever after” as well.
I’m not crying 🥹
Aww thank you Mary! ♥️
I was also a teenager in the early aughts, and it's incredible to realize so many women are recovering from the same propaganda.
I grew up being told I could do "anything a man could do", and the constant recitation had an underlying message: "the only worthwhile achievements are traditionally masculine".
Yes it is a phenomenon I am having mirrored back to me nearly every time I share any personal life anecdotes. The intentions were often good, but the execution and the true message were not, unfortunately.
Emily, you weave so much into your beautiful-and-punchy essays. <3
And, I am also in the second trimester (17 weeks) with our fourth child. So the descriptions of quickening were particularly special, as that's what's been on my own mind in recent weeks. It's such a wild and special experience every time.
Oh Haley thank you! I appreciate, especially coming from you ♥️
So many congratulations on your own fourth babe! Happy to be right alongside you here.
Another wonderful essay Emily, I have so missed your voice on here. Congratulations on your pregnancy, I am so happy for you and your family.
Oh thank you Becca! We are very excited and also I am so happy to be back to writing after starting to feel physically better!
Beautiful essay, Emily. And congratulations!!
Thank you so much Christina!
I really appreciate you writing this piece. The mainstream discussion of abortion as healthcare is woefully inadequate with no allowance for the profundity of carrying a growing life within our bodies. Life is truly sacred and that's why it can't be boiled down to "women's bodily autonomy" or "no bodily autonomy for women." We are the life-givers, the birth keepers, and we gestate and feed all of humanity.
I've been a third party participant to many abortions. Never been part of the act directly, but indirectly as a care coordinator, ultrasound machine operator, telephone triage call taker, or as a nurse on the unit when someone was having a termination. The only tagline take away I have is Abortion is Sad. It just is. Two of my close friends had abortions and it's basically The Unspeakable among us because of how tragic the circumstances were and how internally devastated both friends were by the experience, despite it being "their body, their choice."
I'd love to see your work be more widely discussed! Your perspective is so 🎯.
Thank you. I think in terms of autonomy, women simply must come to terms with the absolute fact that if we are fertile and having sex with fertile men, there very likely will be a time when some of our bodily autonomy must be balanced with the body of another. This starts with actually properly educating young women of course. I think too many of us grew up with this idea that we had so much control over reproduction and that it is a natural right for us to have that control that it becomes second nature to think that any mishaps in that relationship of control must be swiftly and effectively dealt with and that that is just how it is. The issue is that we don’t always have control and when those mishaps happen, we have to be able to grapple with the reality of what is happening within our bodies, not just push it away. I have also been on the more clinical side of this as well and yes, Abortion is Sad. That is the truth. It is a decision that always comes with some consequences, whether they are recognized or not, they are there, living in our bodies. I want women to become more pro-prevention and pro-bodily knowledge over pro-choice or pro-life. There is simply just so much more to it.
Thank you for your last point here as well, it is so encouraging.
Congratulations! I’ve evolved so much in my thinking on this throughout the years, how we view reproduction has a burden and something to be afraid of. How I let my own views be determined by society, culture, men, even women in my family. I won’t be this way with my daughter. I love to way you talk about pain and discomforts place in change as well. So so good.
Thank you Morgan. I think many of our experiences surrounding these most important topics tend to really mirror one another’s as a result of where culture has been for decades now, but I do have a lot of faith in the fact that so many women seem to really have experienced a sea change about these same topic sun recent years.
First of all, congratulations on your pregnancy, what a blessing!
I was very moved by your text and I wholly agree on what you said about cultural coercion disguised as "freedom". One of my dear friends had an abortion around the same time I was pregnant. She was in her thirties, with a steady boyfriend, money, no addictions or health problems. She told me this was her free choice and hers alone, she was doing it because "it wasn't the right time". Yet over the years, she's said some things that didn't sit right with me. How all her friends had told her it would ruin her artistic career. How her (now ex) boyfriend had been callous and unsupportive. How she was lucky she could have it done very quickly because if she'd had to wait a week or two longer, she wouldn't have had the emotional strength to go through with it.
This breaks my heart. I certainly don't see all women who have abortions as helpless victims with no free will - and you say so yourself very eloquently - but it's pure hypocrisy to ignore the culture around us and how it not only normalize but encourages abortions as routine, and worse, shuts down women who talk about their trauma and distress afterwards.
Thank you.
I have heard so many similar stories. Stories where the choice was made solely based on timing. I think the idea that we get full dominion over the timing in our lives is just another symptom of this sterility culture. Waiting for the perfect time to have babies and to get married seems to be a national pastime now, but there is no waiting for the perfect time to have fun or travel or start a career or go to school. If it is an economic or consumeristic endeavor, it is full speed ahead. If it is a relational endeavor that requires commitment and some level of sacrifice (with which comes great joy of course), it’s like “hmm…I don’t know, maybe in 5 years, maybe when I have this much money saved, maybe once I have lost 20 pounds, maybe when I get promoted, maybe after I backpack Europe” etc….these procreative, generative endeavors are simply not prioritized in a healthy way. Which leads to situations like your friend’s, where abortion is the healthcare that allows her to keep her lifestyle. Never mind the emotional and spiritual consequences, never mind that she may not be fertile enough to conceive again in the future. It’s really quite a losing premise unfortunately.
Couldn't agree more. We're in our early forties now and it's extremely unlikely she'll ever have children, because she never settled down with anyone since then (which isn't a coincidence imo). Both of us whittled away our twenties with boyfriends who were perfectly happy saying they were committed to us but unwilling to actually get married and have children, because like you say, why change anything when your life outside of work is all about parties and travels and spending money on yourself? And in a sense a vague "okay but later" is worse than an outright refusal, because it acts like a trap for a young woman who stays for fear that starting over again would delay maternity even more.
I ended up single at 31 after giving my ex-boyfriend an ultimatum. I remembered being terrified that I had missed my chance at motherhood but radically rethinking my priorities led me to meet my husband and I couldn't be happier. My friend stayed in this limbo for several more years and it eventually collapsed after the abortion. I wish there was a way to warn young women not to repress their desire to be mothers, to follow their instinct if they feel it's the right time for THEM and to find good men who have the same priority, but it would be a heck of a lot easier if society didn't do its damnedest to convince them of the opposite.
Congratulations, and thanks for the thoughtful essay. I like how your writing pushes at the limits of things that are are not usually put into words.
Pregnancy and childbirth is a great mystery to me, even though I used all my mental powers to understand what was happening to me and make conscious choices around fertility. I guess that’s why it is a mystery, because I tried everything to de-mystify it, and the experience (X2) was so much bigger than anything my conscious mind could comprehend about it.
Also, for me, it was so hard, and so easy, all at the same time. Getting pregnant was very difficult, but the two times I am aware I was pregnant I had two healthy babies. (I say “aware” because I can think one or two times I *might* have had an early miscarriage but I was not an early tester, so if so I never knew). I also had zero experience with babies before having my own, so I kind of wondered if I would be terrible at it, but it didn’t matter, at all. In fact going in with no preconceptions (lol, pun intended) was probably an asset. I did have help, support and advice when I wanted it (I.e. around breastfeeding) but not people imposing their ideas on me. And then a year after my second daughter, early menopause, yay! Sub fertility was brutal in many ways but completely eliminated decision making around timing or as it turned out, the number of children. It also neatly eliminated most ART because ART did not work (something I am hugely grateful for IN HINDSIGHT).
Most of the conversations around “reproductive choice” and “control” strike me as tone deaf. Of course people have wildly different experiences from me, and are faced with different decisions. But the most profound lessons I learned are that I don’t have conscious control over a lot of things, and letting go of the assumption I could or should was where the peace and freedom was.
I replied to this yesterday but it looks like it never posted, I apologize. Firstly I wanted to say thank you of course ♥️I think many women have tried to arm themselves with knowledge in the procreative process only to find that knowledge only goes so far, and in a way, it is just another form of trying to control the situation which, like you say here, we simply can’t. Reproduction is a space within the human experience where we absolutely lose some control, and I think in realizing that this is okay, we then can actually gain a more complete understanding of what it is to be human.