Not everyone can bear children. Not everyone will bear children in the same way, or with the same outcome. The reasons for this vary widely. Sometimes there are no reasons.
In the United States 7.4% of women ages 15-44 are infertile (and almost 12% have impaired fertility). Worldwide, infertility seems to range from 3-10%.
But these numbers are intended only to suggest scope. For someone who tries and wants to bear children but can’t, the numbers don’t matter much, the sense of loss is personal. In some parts of the world the consequences are severe, women who can’t bear children may be abandoned, stigmatized.
As someone who got pregnant easily, without complication, and who also focuses on childbirth as a site of personal and social change reckoning with infertility and other experiences of life that do not include childbirth are essential to fully exploring this territory of birth-bonding-death, toward a theory of life.
Though I am in no position to offer perspective on the lived experience of infertility, I humbly ask for insight from those who can, and who might also seek to protect the farthest reaches of childbearing without adding insult to injury for those who grieve. (This applies also to those who grieve childbirth experiences that were traumatic or disappointing, who live with disabilities, and in a different way to those who raise their own children through adoption, or choose not to bear children.)
I am convinced that the machinery of our childbirth culture which threatens birth-bonding-death also stigmatizes infertility, childlessness, adoption, disability and sustains the trauma that it seeks to relieve. So I am interested in breaking down barriers here so that we might better see our alliances and work together for our humanity.
Briefly, two components of that machinery are a resistance to death*, and the concept of normal.
In terms of birth, resistance to death shows up in the risk-based assessment of care, the focus on pathology, increased c-section rates, electronic fetal monitoring, litigation for infant mortality, and even in the avoidance of grief that people who’ve had traumatic births regularly hear “at least you have a healthy baby.”
This last comment signals the problem of normalcy, which is not so much about what is normal (”a healthy baby”) but is rather about a sort of standardization of bodies and life experience (characteristics XYZ=healthy baby). In birth, standardization confines what is perceived as “safe” within arbitrary parameters, and limits what is possible from our bodies and souls.
The discomfort with grief and loss as a part of life (death) and standardization of our bodies and experiences effects us all regardless of childbearing by turning us into citizens “whose actions are governed through the exercise of [our] own capacity to choose in accordance with the norm(al).” (quoting from Shelley Tremain in “Reproductive Freedom, Self-Regulation, and the Government of Impairment in Utero”)
I’ll leave you with that provocative notion and my humble request for insight from those with different experiences of childbearing than mine (acknowledging that there is way more to be said about death, risk, safety, standardization, normalcy, and our shared responsibility for it all).
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* it occurs to me that it’s not just a resistance to death but a sort of fetishizing of death based on denial-that-gives-the-denied-excessive-power.
Indra - I am inspired by your invitation to those ostracized by discussion of childbearing. I love your inclusivity. I love your passion. I love you!
Thank you so much for inviting these responses. It’s given me a chance to think/sort out, and a little vehicle for writing something down.
Last month, I just went through my second miscarriage. (I had one 3 years ago, then had my daughter, and now had a second.)
Miscarriage is its own form of infertility; one is fertile, able to “become” pregnant, but for some reason the pregnancy does not work out. The first time I experienced this, it felt very traumatic for me, it seemed like a great loss. But there was a struggle too, there are many greater losses, losing a fetus at 10 weeks seems like it shouldn’t be as bad as, say, losing a child, and it is not. But thew world, friends, family, seemed to expect that I should have gotten over it more quickly than I did. I still know my due date, and when I meet children born around then, I note to myself that that baby would have been there age…
This second one has been so different; I have been lucky, and had an amazing and healthy child. The first one was later, this one was very early, and much less physically traumatic. But I am still sad, and very disconcerted.
In writing about this, I started to think about what I think is the real underlying issue: I feel like my body has betrayed me, and I feel so helpless about this. Body betrayal is such a theme for women in our culture. Somewhere around the age of 11 or 12, (maybe earlier for some) we start to really feel all the messages about our bodies. We are told, and often believe, that we should be thinner, taller, curvier, less curvy, prettier, and on and on and on…. Our bodies betray us because they do not fit the mold we want them too, we believe we would be happier, more loved, better, if our bodies were better. Some people starve ourselves, try to change our bodies, etc. I definitely did not follow these extremes, but I spent many years “hating” my body, willing it to be different, feeling betrayed.
And yet, our bodies give us the life we have; at some point I learned to reconcile this, to LOVE my body. I learned to stop comparing myself constantly to other women, to eye other jealously for having what I did not. I loved myself, felt good in my skin.
So, with these two miscarriages, I have felt some of these same issues come up. Rationally I know that this is normal, and not indicative of whether I will ever have another child. But I feel so betrayed by my own body! I wonder whether i have “bad eggs” or if I should have had babies younger. I wonder “what’s wrong with me???” I eye pregnant women with envy, like I used to eye women with the tiny waist I once coveted. (ironic!)
Reading your blog, following the larger discussion about woman and birth, Body betrayal is such a big part of this. Medicalization of birth teaches us that our bodies will betray us, and we need the medical system to force those bodies into some kind of submission. Of course, that’s a rather sweeping generaliztion, but in the context of how women in our culture are taught, early on, how to feel about our bodies, this makes quite a lot of sense.
At any rate, Fertility is such a strange and mysterious thing. It is so basic, to evolution, so scientific, and yet feels magical, so out of our hands. But so is being a woman. We constantly struggle with our inner and outer worlds. Our inner instincts which tell us what we need, and the outer which tells us what we “should” be. I know in my heart that things will unfold the way they are supposed to be with respect to my own parenthood, but I am learning a lesson about patience, and about unconditional love (for myself, the body that won’t do exactly what I want it to do) and gratitude for the wonderful things I have -rather than constantly wishing for what I don’t It’s easier to write than to actually live, but
I am looking forward to and hoping to see other responses to this, and grateful, again for the invitation to open up.
*jane
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just to note, I should have checked for type-os! I really know the difference between They’re There and Their, as well as some other glaring errors!
*jz
Hi, very nice post. I have been wonder’n bout this issue,so thanks for posting
Good! I’d love to hear more if you care to share!
I wanted to return to this and say a bit more. I think this idea of body betrayal is really critical and a helpful way to think about birth, bonding and death. When it come to death and disease too, I know people experience it as a sort of body betrayal - across gender (though I wonder if gender might exacerbate the feeling of betrayal?) - and that medical intervention can also increase that sense of helplessness and that sense of body-failure. But after reading Denys Cope’s book about death “Dying a Natural Process,” and watching the video about home funerals “A Family Undertaking,” I am even more convinced that we are not served by having a betrayal-relationship to our bodies. Rather, death too, is not a failure, it is a part of health, a part of life. In fact, maybe it is our relationship to deaths both literal and metaphorical that hold our experiences of betrayal in place. I wonder if I had understood puberty as a sort of death of the child-me, and had the wherewithal to celebrate it as such, if that might have given me a place to put those feelings of betrayal - a container and some meaning beyond myself. Certainly in the case of miscarriage, and even in being unable to conceive, there is death, there is a sense of being outside of reproduction, at a loss. And another question I’ll pose: those of you raising daughters in particular, how might you prepare them for their bodies? How can we prepare ourselves, each other, our children for the reality of our living-breathing-changing-dying selves?
You know, I don’t read blogs. But yours is really worth beeing read.