Thank you for this. You articulated so much of what I think and believe and feel, deep in my heart, especially since becoming a mother. I wrote my own piece on that WaPo article, reflecting on the fact that I was put on the pill at 15 (passive voice intended) and the ramifications it had, but you go so much further in your vision of a society that honors and centers fertility.
"We are meant for this in a way that is very basic, of course. We are meant for this as a matter of fact and a matter of survival." I recently read an interview with an author who wrote a book about the growing number of women choosing not to have children, and she said that wanting to have children was nothing more than a social construct. I'm absolutely astounded at the amount of biological denialism that is currently sweeping through feminism like wildfire, burning all rational thought in its wake. It's ironic, because for so long these same feminists accused religious institutions of holding the body and sexuality in contempt, and maybe they weren't entirely wrong, but today they are the ones speaking as if we are purely spiritual and technological beings, and not mammals with a much larger brain. If we had no survival instinct whatsoever, and that includes the steadfast, unshakable desire to reproduce like any other species, we would have been extinct long ago. Pretending this isn't real is a one-way road to nihilism, and is only possible because we're being drugged, distracted and overworked into a stupor.
What an astoundingly apt comment, thank you. The childfree messaging and everything being framed as a social construct is such madness. It’s all built on a foundation of mistrust of the self too-and when people put that messaging out there, it just further works to instill a sense of doubt in our capabilities and instincts.
Your point on feminists and the church and the opinion the movement in general holds that focuses so much on the mental rather than the physiological is so interesting and illuminating because it is spot on! I think of course it is always interesting to delve in the thinking kind and emotions and psychology but the foundation those things are built on is the physical body.
I will read your piece, looking forward to it! Thank you for sharing.
“Every discussion about centering mothers and babies seems to begin and end with ‘but not all women want to be mothers and not all women can become mothers and also we need free universal childcare and men need to take on more childcare responsibilities and also there’s too much pressure to breastfeed and maternal mental health and children are too expensive to raise’… it just goes on and on and on.” — this piece was full of gold but this part stands out to me. It seems our culture has a real ambivalence about motherhood. It’s both everything you said above, and *also* “when we want to have a baby we better have it IMMEDIATELY” (as you touched on). It’s just… so gross.
One thing I’ve been thinking about is that it seems mothers are the only group we cannot celebrate. Those posts that go around on Mother’s Day every year that are like “Happy Mother’s Day to literally everyone except the average, regular mother” drive me crazy. And we all know that sharing anything positive related to motherhood is generally not acceptable — it means you’re mom-shaming and you think you’re better than everyone. OR you’re implying that women without kids are doomed to live sad, meaningless lives🤦🏽♀️
If fertility were central in our culture—and not in a way that takes advantage of women as maybe has been the case in times past—maybe mothers wouldn’t be such a low-status group, and maybe then their work would be valued, and maybe then maybe everything would stop falling apart.
“Maybe everything would stop falling apart” is the crux of it all-makes one consider what a truly matricentric society would look like.
Also the barrage of Mother’s Day infographics for “moms who aren’t moms, dog moms, plant moms, moms who are estranged from their children they neglected,trans women who are mothers, moms that never wanted to be moms, single fathers, surrogates, moms whose babies are their passion project” etc etc etc every year drives me mad. I don’t hold a deep need/connection for Mother’s Day really but I suppose it is nice and also can we let it be what it is supposed to be? Can we all just calm down a little?
I don’t hold a need for it either, but I find it irritating and also telling that that even just for one day, we still cannot honor mothers. Just, mothers.
Yes the idea of a matriarchal society is interesting!
I bitterly refer to Mother's Day as All Women Matter Day, since the common approach seems akin to the All Lives Matter rejoinder to Black Lives Matter.
Years before I left Christianity for insufficiently addressing motherhood and birth, I would always skip church on Mother's Day, since I'd never heard a Mother's Day sermon that didn't boil down to All Women Matter.
It's one day! Can mothers have one day? Maybe give the All Women Matter sermon on International Women's Day instead.
Ever since becoming a mother nearly 18 years ago, I did all I could, as you describe, to centre my life around fertility. I breastfed my daughter til she was just under two years old, I quit work outside the home completely and managed with 5 to 10 hours of home based computer work after she turned two, I spent many hours outdoors with my toddler and then enrolled her in a bush kinder program. We had a plot at a community garden and she spent most weekends there with us and we always lived close to the river in our city and had much time in nature. I cooked from scratch following weston price traditions and I loved being a mum more than anything in the world, it was a time of closer connection to other women with all the early years activities, and I was relieved to be out of the 9 to 5 grind. My partner and I read the continuum Concept and other attachment parenting books while I was pregnant and we co slept with our daughter right up until she started primary school.
I say all this a precursor to add, that despite an embodied and ecological upbringing, my daughter at the age of 14 during covid lockdowns, told us she was ‘trans’ and now nearly 4 years later she is still committed to this identity and we face the prospect of her going on cross sex hormones when she turns 18 and all that this entails. The grief and disbelief as this has sunk in over the past year has been unbearable. At first i was proud of her bucking female stereotypes, but I did not really believe or understand that this meant it would lead to an actual medical transition, but this seems like the most likely outcome. So this is to say that the force of the culture that we are in, the machine, is stronger than any of us individually, and not to blame yourself if you happen to be in the same boat.
I am having to make my peace with this. And stop looking back and blaming myself for all the things I did or did not do as a mum, that might have caused this (such as wishing we had of home schooled more than anything). Otherwise my own sanity would be at stake. In trying to find peace - I have sort out examples of what I see as embodied and authentic people living as non binary or trans. I was very surprised to find one lovely young woman on IG who identifies as non binary and was working as a Doula, assisting women give birth. She calls herself the Queer Doula, and there was even a post about a woman with a beard who was giving birth, apparently some women who take T are still fertile. I say woman, as I still refuse to use the language, no matter what they do to their bodies they will always be women.
My other way to cope is to take a deep time perspective and to look at the history of hominids going back millions of years. And lastly, most sadly of all, I think it is likely that there IS a biological/chemical reason in the mix, as to why so many youth are experiencing gender dsyphoria, and this may be due to the forever chemicals that are rampant throughout our food chain now (there are studies on this).
Coming to terms with this is part of my bigger collapse acceptance, to realise that our species is already moving towards being functionally extinct. And this is not nihilism - it is surrender and living within grace limits, knowing where we are at as a species and choosing to live life now in love and acceptance, come what may.
Thank you for sharing, Renz. Firstly, all of the effort and love and commitment you put into mothering is admirable and sounds like it was so rewarding for you! Also, I love The Continuum Concept, it is the book I always recommend to first time parents.
I am sorry for the the experience you and your daughter are having, I know she probably wouldn’t appreciate that sentiment, but I mean it all the same. I can imagine the difficulty of facing the future as she becomes more in control of those medical decisions and the permanent nature of some of those things.
I have to wonder what impact Covid and the lockdowns had in terms of this specific phenomenon. Also just certain internet culture in general of course. Sometimes when I consider all of the young people going through this, a few of which I have known and witnessed personally-it feels like spell of sorts has been casted on them, and it always comes back to online spaces for the source of that spell. I may be wrong, and I’m speaking very generally here. Those forever chemicals certainly have to play a serious role as well.
I see what you are saying about that functional extinction but I don’t think I agree, at least at this junction. Maybe I’m a hopeless optimist but despite my internet ramblings on the broken state of things, I hold a lot of hope for the future. I think mainly due to the people I know who are having so many children who are really lovely and aligned and embodied-I see what you mean about this not always been enough though, and really appreciate you choosing to be so candid here in sharing your experiences.
Man here, but I'm blown away by the quality of your writing. It is beautiful, it is powerful and incredibly well researched, well thought out and delivered with a truly beautiful passion. The passion of knowing the truth.
Speaking the truth is hard, thank you for doing it so well.
Thank you for recognizing what my aim is and for taking the time to share such sincere praise with me. Also honestly I always want to thank others who say things like this to me just for having their eyes and hearts open enough to be open to the message.
FERTILITY MATTERS WHETHER OR NOT ONE CHOOSES TO HAVE CHILDREN. Fertility IS a key INdicator of overAll health, WELLth and vitality 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼 so much gold Here — AS PER USUAL EMILY!!!
Thank you Anja and yes! That is a very critical point here that many seem to gloss over or not even recognize at all, so thank you for seeing it and sharing it!
I love this piece thank you! I am originally from Brazil where interventions were the norm and not the exception when I birthed my first child. My aunt and Gynechologist obstetrician thought I was mad for choosing to birth as I did. I understand her. She had never met anyone that chose to birth naturally. So her mind and what she recommended to her patients, obviously, would reflect that. Since then I've been actively working with a certain demographic to help reframe the cyclical nature of women (and of course fertility is a part of that), specially in the context of systems change. Its tricky but in some places it's starting to be more accepted and that gives me hope.
I have heard stories from Brazil and seen their stats for things like elective c-sections so I can imagine what the general attitude towards birth is there! So wonderful that you are doing work to re-frame. I will check your Substack out, thank you for sharing!
Biologist and ex-dirt farmer here. Everything you say makes perfect sense, and fit perfectly in society back when those paintings were done, which happened during times when the struggle to have more babies than dying kids/young people was still real, and much more necessary for having the labor for the family chores.
Just as we still like to eat as if famine was just around the corner, do we want to have as many babies as we can handle.
I remember how hot the words "I'm ovulating" made me, how I could tell just by her smell sometimes, and how she used to basically attack me after coming back from hanging out with pregnant friends.
Have those babies as long as you like. You are fountains of life in a world of sick people enamored with death. You are still very needed.
Female power and potential is still mostly unrealized. There's no reason all women shouldn't be able to naturally learn to know and control their fertility as closely as they like.
I thought you were being sarcastic as I read through that first paragraph but reading your comment in full I don’t think you were-I feel like anytime I discuss things like this people being up the past and use it as a weapon against my opinions or feelings when really I can recognize the issues of the past while still feeling intuitively that I would have been better suited to the way of the world back then. For all the reasons you state in your last paragraph-that’s the world I live in in my heart.
This is straight FIRE. I LOVE IT. I don't have a family yet but that has been on my heart since I was a little girl, to be a wife and a mother. We're taught that periods and childbirth are just miserable and the only thing you can do is medicate yourself. I was told by girls at school that I should take birth control because of how painful my periods were, but I thank God that I never did. I've learned so much over the past 2 years about how to truly nourish myself and honor my female physiology. I have minimal to non existent PMS symptoms which I never thought was possible. It breaks my heart that so many women and young girls are and have been lied to about how beautiful, joyous, and fun it is to be a woman. Society wants to talk about "female empowerment" and liberating them from their homes as if it were a prison. Empower means "to give official authority or legal power to"...Who has the authority when these women go out into the workforce? It isn't them. The most empowering place for a woman IS the home, where she takes charge of her household and children.
Thank you Sarah! What a blessing (perhaps a blessing, perhaps more due to sense and honesty) in this day and age for you to have these realizations now before you have a family-these are the sorts of revelations many of us only had after it was “too late” in many ways-which is why I focus so much on how to guide children. And what a blessing it will be for your future children to have a mother so firmly grounded in reality.
Thank you Emily! You are so sweet. I look forward to those days very much:) I have prayed to have wisdom and discernment every day for most of my life, and I really think God has answered that prayer time and time again. I'm so grateful to be able to pour into my nieces, nephews, and the children I babysit weekly. It's so sweet to watch them grasp the good things you are teaching them whether by words or actions, or how to own up to the things you mess up.
Yes-what I said about the subjugation of the meaning of love is exactly it-and it doesn’t matter what one thinks about the topic in general, we have to be able to see messages like that and think “absolutely not, this is trickery”.
Do women cease to have value when we are no longer fertile? Im within 10 years of that and do not believe I lose value but everyone else seems to think so if you are not 20 years old until you die.
Absolutely not, and no where in the piece do I insinuate such. I touch on what female physiology and the potential for fertility, whether currently experiencing this or having done so in the past (or future) impacts women and girls.
My apologies for my reactive reply! It’s a comment I get quite a bit when discussing these matters and I suppose it’s an argument I’m tired of having as such. To answer more earnestly, I think the value evolves. Women once out of their fertile years have the wisdom gleaned from whatever experiences they had while in those years, similarly women who never had intact fertility for whatever reason will have gleaned their own unique wisdom from those experiences (those experiences still very much are uniquely female as well!).
Im not sure what that argument is, I'm just speaking to the amount of content that only talks about 20 year old female virgins with no kids. That's not realistic nor relatable. A lot of women have fertility until their 50s, granted it does cause more issues. Women over 50 are not useless just because they are no longer fertile. That is where my question came from, not an attack on what you said.
I understand. I have seen some of that content as well but I think it is mainly coming from a certain breed of man whose opinion just isn’t the most compelling to me. I agree that women past fertility have so much value-again, it is just an evolved version of their prior value paired with the wisdom gained in that life stage.
Historically, I was in fact, made for this.
- Me, 2024, double-board certified woman and mother
Hahaha I love it. I’m going to call myself triple-certified since I have three kids now.
I'm about to receive my triple-board certification in August, so y'all better watch out.
Thank you for this. You articulated so much of what I think and believe and feel, deep in my heart, especially since becoming a mother. I wrote my own piece on that WaPo article, reflecting on the fact that I was put on the pill at 15 (passive voice intended) and the ramifications it had, but you go so much further in your vision of a society that honors and centers fertility.
"We are meant for this in a way that is very basic, of course. We are meant for this as a matter of fact and a matter of survival." I recently read an interview with an author who wrote a book about the growing number of women choosing not to have children, and she said that wanting to have children was nothing more than a social construct. I'm absolutely astounded at the amount of biological denialism that is currently sweeping through feminism like wildfire, burning all rational thought in its wake. It's ironic, because for so long these same feminists accused religious institutions of holding the body and sexuality in contempt, and maybe they weren't entirely wrong, but today they are the ones speaking as if we are purely spiritual and technological beings, and not mammals with a much larger brain. If we had no survival instinct whatsoever, and that includes the steadfast, unshakable desire to reproduce like any other species, we would have been extinct long ago. Pretending this isn't real is a one-way road to nihilism, and is only possible because we're being drugged, distracted and overworked into a stupor.
What an astoundingly apt comment, thank you. The childfree messaging and everything being framed as a social construct is such madness. It’s all built on a foundation of mistrust of the self too-and when people put that messaging out there, it just further works to instill a sense of doubt in our capabilities and instincts.
Your point on feminists and the church and the opinion the movement in general holds that focuses so much on the mental rather than the physiological is so interesting and illuminating because it is spot on! I think of course it is always interesting to delve in the thinking kind and emotions and psychology but the foundation those things are built on is the physical body.
I will read your piece, looking forward to it! Thank you for sharing.
This comment is beautiful, thank you for articulating what I often feel.
“Every discussion about centering mothers and babies seems to begin and end with ‘but not all women want to be mothers and not all women can become mothers and also we need free universal childcare and men need to take on more childcare responsibilities and also there’s too much pressure to breastfeed and maternal mental health and children are too expensive to raise’… it just goes on and on and on.” — this piece was full of gold but this part stands out to me. It seems our culture has a real ambivalence about motherhood. It’s both everything you said above, and *also* “when we want to have a baby we better have it IMMEDIATELY” (as you touched on). It’s just… so gross.
One thing I’ve been thinking about is that it seems mothers are the only group we cannot celebrate. Those posts that go around on Mother’s Day every year that are like “Happy Mother’s Day to literally everyone except the average, regular mother” drive me crazy. And we all know that sharing anything positive related to motherhood is generally not acceptable — it means you’re mom-shaming and you think you’re better than everyone. OR you’re implying that women without kids are doomed to live sad, meaningless lives🤦🏽♀️
If fertility were central in our culture—and not in a way that takes advantage of women as maybe has been the case in times past—maybe mothers wouldn’t be such a low-status group, and maybe then their work would be valued, and maybe then maybe everything would stop falling apart.
“Maybe everything would stop falling apart” is the crux of it all-makes one consider what a truly matricentric society would look like.
Also the barrage of Mother’s Day infographics for “moms who aren’t moms, dog moms, plant moms, moms who are estranged from their children they neglected,trans women who are mothers, moms that never wanted to be moms, single fathers, surrogates, moms whose babies are their passion project” etc etc etc every year drives me mad. I don’t hold a deep need/connection for Mother’s Day really but I suppose it is nice and also can we let it be what it is supposed to be? Can we all just calm down a little?
I don’t hold a need for it either, but I find it irritating and also telling that that even just for one day, we still cannot honor mothers. Just, mothers.
Yes the idea of a matriarchal society is interesting!
I bitterly refer to Mother's Day as All Women Matter Day, since the common approach seems akin to the All Lives Matter rejoinder to Black Lives Matter.
Years before I left Christianity for insufficiently addressing motherhood and birth, I would always skip church on Mother's Day, since I'd never heard a Mother's Day sermon that didn't boil down to All Women Matter.
It's one day! Can mothers have one day? Maybe give the All Women Matter sermon on International Women's Day instead.
Ever since becoming a mother nearly 18 years ago, I did all I could, as you describe, to centre my life around fertility. I breastfed my daughter til she was just under two years old, I quit work outside the home completely and managed with 5 to 10 hours of home based computer work after she turned two, I spent many hours outdoors with my toddler and then enrolled her in a bush kinder program. We had a plot at a community garden and she spent most weekends there with us and we always lived close to the river in our city and had much time in nature. I cooked from scratch following weston price traditions and I loved being a mum more than anything in the world, it was a time of closer connection to other women with all the early years activities, and I was relieved to be out of the 9 to 5 grind. My partner and I read the continuum Concept and other attachment parenting books while I was pregnant and we co slept with our daughter right up until she started primary school.
I say all this a precursor to add, that despite an embodied and ecological upbringing, my daughter at the age of 14 during covid lockdowns, told us she was ‘trans’ and now nearly 4 years later she is still committed to this identity and we face the prospect of her going on cross sex hormones when she turns 18 and all that this entails. The grief and disbelief as this has sunk in over the past year has been unbearable. At first i was proud of her bucking female stereotypes, but I did not really believe or understand that this meant it would lead to an actual medical transition, but this seems like the most likely outcome. So this is to say that the force of the culture that we are in, the machine, is stronger than any of us individually, and not to blame yourself if you happen to be in the same boat.
I am having to make my peace with this. And stop looking back and blaming myself for all the things I did or did not do as a mum, that might have caused this (such as wishing we had of home schooled more than anything). Otherwise my own sanity would be at stake. In trying to find peace - I have sort out examples of what I see as embodied and authentic people living as non binary or trans. I was very surprised to find one lovely young woman on IG who identifies as non binary and was working as a Doula, assisting women give birth. She calls herself the Queer Doula, and there was even a post about a woman with a beard who was giving birth, apparently some women who take T are still fertile. I say woman, as I still refuse to use the language, no matter what they do to their bodies they will always be women.
My other way to cope is to take a deep time perspective and to look at the history of hominids going back millions of years. And lastly, most sadly of all, I think it is likely that there IS a biological/chemical reason in the mix, as to why so many youth are experiencing gender dsyphoria, and this may be due to the forever chemicals that are rampant throughout our food chain now (there are studies on this).
Coming to terms with this is part of my bigger collapse acceptance, to realise that our species is already moving towards being functionally extinct. And this is not nihilism - it is surrender and living within grace limits, knowing where we are at as a species and choosing to live life now in love and acceptance, come what may.
Thank you for sharing, Renz. Firstly, all of the effort and love and commitment you put into mothering is admirable and sounds like it was so rewarding for you! Also, I love The Continuum Concept, it is the book I always recommend to first time parents.
I am sorry for the the experience you and your daughter are having, I know she probably wouldn’t appreciate that sentiment, but I mean it all the same. I can imagine the difficulty of facing the future as she becomes more in control of those medical decisions and the permanent nature of some of those things.
I have to wonder what impact Covid and the lockdowns had in terms of this specific phenomenon. Also just certain internet culture in general of course. Sometimes when I consider all of the young people going through this, a few of which I have known and witnessed personally-it feels like spell of sorts has been casted on them, and it always comes back to online spaces for the source of that spell. I may be wrong, and I’m speaking very generally here. Those forever chemicals certainly have to play a serious role as well.
I see what you are saying about that functional extinction but I don’t think I agree, at least at this junction. Maybe I’m a hopeless optimist but despite my internet ramblings on the broken state of things, I hold a lot of hope for the future. I think mainly due to the people I know who are having so many children who are really lovely and aligned and embodied-I see what you mean about this not always been enough though, and really appreciate you choosing to be so candid here in sharing your experiences.
Man here, but I'm blown away by the quality of your writing. It is beautiful, it is powerful and incredibly well researched, well thought out and delivered with a truly beautiful passion. The passion of knowing the truth.
Speaking the truth is hard, thank you for doing it so well.
Thank you for recognizing what my aim is and for taking the time to share such sincere praise with me. Also honestly I always want to thank others who say things like this to me just for having their eyes and hearts open enough to be open to the message.
FERTILITY MATTERS WHETHER OR NOT ONE CHOOSES TO HAVE CHILDREN. Fertility IS a key INdicator of overAll health, WELLth and vitality 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼 so much gold Here — AS PER USUAL EMILY!!!
Thank you Anja and yes! That is a very critical point here that many seem to gloss over or not even recognize at all, so thank you for seeing it and sharing it!
It IS One of the most important poINts to BE made and HIGHLIGHTED. I AM WITH YOU SISTER!!!
I love this piece thank you! I am originally from Brazil where interventions were the norm and not the exception when I birthed my first child. My aunt and Gynechologist obstetrician thought I was mad for choosing to birth as I did. I understand her. She had never met anyone that chose to birth naturally. So her mind and what she recommended to her patients, obviously, would reflect that. Since then I've been actively working with a certain demographic to help reframe the cyclical nature of women (and of course fertility is a part of that), specially in the context of systems change. Its tricky but in some places it's starting to be more accepted and that gives me hope.
Nice to discover your substack. :-) Mine is https://theclab.substack.com/
I have heard stories from Brazil and seen their stats for things like elective c-sections so I can imagine what the general attitude towards birth is there! So wonderful that you are doing work to re-frame. I will check your Substack out, thank you for sharing!
Biologist and ex-dirt farmer here. Everything you say makes perfect sense, and fit perfectly in society back when those paintings were done, which happened during times when the struggle to have more babies than dying kids/young people was still real, and much more necessary for having the labor for the family chores.
Just as we still like to eat as if famine was just around the corner, do we want to have as many babies as we can handle.
I remember how hot the words "I'm ovulating" made me, how I could tell just by her smell sometimes, and how she used to basically attack me after coming back from hanging out with pregnant friends.
Have those babies as long as you like. You are fountains of life in a world of sick people enamored with death. You are still very needed.
Female power and potential is still mostly unrealized. There's no reason all women shouldn't be able to naturally learn to know and control their fertility as closely as they like.
I thought you were being sarcastic as I read through that first paragraph but reading your comment in full I don’t think you were-I feel like anytime I discuss things like this people being up the past and use it as a weapon against my opinions or feelings when really I can recognize the issues of the past while still feeling intuitively that I would have been better suited to the way of the world back then. For all the reasons you state in your last paragraph-that’s the world I live in in my heart.
That was phenomenal to read. Thank you
Thank you for reading!
Those first few paragraphs alone...!!!
Thank you Haley! ♥️
This is straight FIRE. I LOVE IT. I don't have a family yet but that has been on my heart since I was a little girl, to be a wife and a mother. We're taught that periods and childbirth are just miserable and the only thing you can do is medicate yourself. I was told by girls at school that I should take birth control because of how painful my periods were, but I thank God that I never did. I've learned so much over the past 2 years about how to truly nourish myself and honor my female physiology. I have minimal to non existent PMS symptoms which I never thought was possible. It breaks my heart that so many women and young girls are and have been lied to about how beautiful, joyous, and fun it is to be a woman. Society wants to talk about "female empowerment" and liberating them from their homes as if it were a prison. Empower means "to give official authority or legal power to"...Who has the authority when these women go out into the workforce? It isn't them. The most empowering place for a woman IS the home, where she takes charge of her household and children.
Thank you Sarah! What a blessing (perhaps a blessing, perhaps more due to sense and honesty) in this day and age for you to have these realizations now before you have a family-these are the sorts of revelations many of us only had after it was “too late” in many ways-which is why I focus so much on how to guide children. And what a blessing it will be for your future children to have a mother so firmly grounded in reality.
Thank you Emily! You are so sweet. I look forward to those days very much:) I have prayed to have wisdom and discernment every day for most of my life, and I really think God has answered that prayer time and time again. I'm so grateful to be able to pour into my nieces, nephews, and the children I babysit weekly. It's so sweet to watch them grasp the good things you are teaching them whether by words or actions, or how to own up to the things you mess up.
Oh. My. GOSH this was so good. THANK YOU!!
Thank you Rachel!
yes! yes! yes! hurrah for you and your wise words.
I cannot INnerstand how abortion and Love can ever BE used IN the same sentence.
Yes-what I said about the subjugation of the meaning of love is exactly it-and it doesn’t matter what one thinks about the topic in general, we have to be able to see messages like that and think “absolutely not, this is trickery”.
I WholeHeARTedly agree.
I shared the TESTimony of how I WEnt from BEINg pro-Choice to pro-Life after my abortion experience on my SUBSTACK, IN case you feel the call to tap IN — https://open.substack.com/pub/theheavenlyheritage/p/his-body-his-choice?r=pn5lf&utm_medium=ios
I explore it through a scientific, theological and Spiritual lens 🤍🤲🏼
I will read today, thank you Anja!
👏👏👏
Thank you Catie!
Do women cease to have value when we are no longer fertile? Im within 10 years of that and do not believe I lose value but everyone else seems to think so if you are not 20 years old until you die.
Absolutely not, and no where in the piece do I insinuate such. I touch on what female physiology and the potential for fertility, whether currently experiencing this or having done so in the past (or future) impacts women and girls.
I did not say you did. My apologies if it came across that way.
My apologies for my reactive reply! It’s a comment I get quite a bit when discussing these matters and I suppose it’s an argument I’m tired of having as such. To answer more earnestly, I think the value evolves. Women once out of their fertile years have the wisdom gleaned from whatever experiences they had while in those years, similarly women who never had intact fertility for whatever reason will have gleaned their own unique wisdom from those experiences (those experiences still very much are uniquely female as well!).
Im not sure what that argument is, I'm just speaking to the amount of content that only talks about 20 year old female virgins with no kids. That's not realistic nor relatable. A lot of women have fertility until their 50s, granted it does cause more issues. Women over 50 are not useless just because they are no longer fertile. That is where my question came from, not an attack on what you said.
I understand. I have seen some of that content as well but I think it is mainly coming from a certain breed of man whose opinion just isn’t the most compelling to me. I agree that women past fertility have so much value-again, it is just an evolved version of their prior value paired with the wisdom gained in that life stage.