{"id":1883,"date":"2005-10-12T06:09:50","date_gmt":"2005-10-12T13:09:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2005\/10\/12\/im-not-just-an-incubator\/"},"modified":"2005-10-12T06:09:50","modified_gmt":"2005-10-12T13:09:50","slug":"im-not-just-an-incubator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=1883","title":{"rendered":"I'm not just an incubator"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the booklet Listen: your baby’s life before birth<\/i>, which I received as part of a pack of free samples from various companies, there’s a page devoted to the way hormones cross the placenta, allowing the unborn child to experience, in its own way, the mother’s emotional reactions. It goes on to warn:<\/p>\n

Repeated maternal stress should always be avoided during pregnancy, as it may alter the baby’s patterns of sleep and activity on a permanent basis.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That passive construction makes me suspicious. Who’s responsible for avoiding maternal stress? Is it simply saying that we should, as a society, avoid putting pregnant women under too much stress? I could heartily endorse that position. Or is it suggesting that pregnant women, along with everything else we expect of them, have a responsibility to their unborn babies not to get stressed out?<\/p>\n

The second half of the sentence isn’t promising either. In my experience of repeated maternal stress, the baby’s sleep patterns are the smallest problem. Stress can make a pregnant women vulnerable to all kinds of health niggles, some of which can turn into serious health problems if they’re not picked up. Stress can lead to depression, to lack of interest in preparations for the baby’s arrival, to dark thoughts of whether it’s too late for abortion. Repeated maternal stress should be avoided because it’s bad for the mother<\/b>, not just because it could be bad for the baby.<\/p>\n

Before I was pregnant, I thought “woman, what woman?” was an attitude held only by fairly extreme pro-lifers who had never come into contact with a pregnant woman in all their sheltered lives. But to my surprise, I keep seeing a very similar attitude from people who provide health care to pregnant women on a daily basis. They talk to me, they look me in the eye, they ask me how I am, but under the surface, I get a distinct impression that they see me as an incubator. The baby is all that matters.<\/p>\n

My health visitor – a trained midwife charged with making sure new families have all the support they need – asked me during a routine check-up whether I was eating well. I replied that I was doing my best – a flared-up infection had left me with a low fever, aching joints and no desire to do anything but sleep, and had disrupted my eating patterns for a few days – and got a lecture about how my best wasn’t good enough. I had to eat a perfectly healthy diet at all times because the baby needs nutrients.<\/p>\n

A pregnant woman needs to eat well for her own sake, not just the baby’s. Iron-deficiency anaemia is especially common in pregnancy, and makes any tired, lethargic feelings even worse. More seriously, if her diet doesn’t supply enough calcium for her needs and the baby’s, Mother Nature harshly dictates that the baby comes first. If the price of strong bones for the little one is erosion of the mother’s teeth, too bad for the mother’s teeth.<\/p>\n

Why didn’t my health visitor remind me of these health issues? Why did she concentrate instead on the harm an inadequate diet could do my baby? I think the answer lies in a belief that goes deep in our society: a pregnant woman is a womb first and a human being second. Because I’ve chosen to have this baby, many people assume I’ve also chosen to put my personality to one side for at least nine months and think about nothing but the baby, all day and all night.<\/p>\n

Sometimes I do put the baby’s needs before my own wishes – when I switch to orange juice after the first beer rather than run the risk of damaging the baby with my pre-pregnancy alcohol consumption, for instance. And sometimes, knowing I’m helping my baby as well as myself gives me the courage to stand up for things I wouldn’t otherwise stand up for. But other times, I’m just myself; the same self I was before I was pregnant. I oversleep and skip breakfast. I walk a couple of miles to take in a football match. I grieve for the bits of my past that didn’t stop hurting just because I have a new life inside me.<\/p>\n

I don’t believe I’m unusual in any of this. I guess most women who are pregnant by choice and looking forward to having the baby will want to do the best they can for their child, but I don’t imagine anyone can support nine months of being nothing but an incubator. We all have to balance the baby’s needs against our own – “Yes, it’s better for the baby if I eat wholesome, home-cooked meals, but tonight I’m too shattered to do anything but shove a frozen pizza in the oven” – and sometimes the balance we strike won’t be easy for onlookers to understand.<\/p>\n

Women’s choices – especially when it comes to motherhood – come under intense scrutiny from society. I feel as if I need to defend myself against the charges of skipping breakfast, thereby depriving my baby of vital nutrients; of letting myself get stressed, thereby disrupting my baby’s sleep patterns; of being unfit to be pregnant in the first place, thereby forcing my baby to develop in a sub-standard womb. The world throws advice at me from all sides, and I have neither the experience nor the confidence to sort out the vital from the trivial. I defer to the greater experience of medical professionals, but they invariably err on the side of protecting the baby from every possible harm.<\/p>\n

In the early days of my pregnancy, I became concerned that the vitamin C tablets I was taking for my own health and comfort had an advisory on the packaging that they shouldn’t be taken during pregnancy without medical advice. I checked with my doctor; he told me not to take them. He couldn’t point to any specific danger to the baby, but there was “no point” in taking them. He could have informed me of the risks and allowed me to decide for myself whether the benefits outweighed them, but he didn’t.<\/p>\n

Treating pregnant women as incubators with no needs or wishes of their own isn’t just anti-feminist, it’s probably also counter-productive. If the medical establishment doesn’t seem interested in meeting my needs, I’m going to start trusting it less. This is fine if I can simultaneously develop my own robust sense of what risks are acceptable – like my mother, who by her fourth child had a very good idea of how much alcohol she could safely consume during pregnancy – but I could all too easily come to dangerously wrong conclusions. Disregarding the advice that there’s no point taking vitamin C probably won’t do much harm; disregarding the advice that headaches and blurred vision are grounds for an immediate trip to the hospital could be fatal to mother and child.<\/p>\n

Pregnant women are as capable of making their own decisions as any other segment of the population. We know what’s right for us, and if we’re given enough information, we can co-ordinate that with what’s right for our babies and strike a balance. But society – and given my defensiveness I’m inclined to consider myself part of the problem – needs to stop brushing our needs aside as trivial and start trusting us to make those decisions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the booklet Listen: your baby’s life before birth, which I received as part of a pack of free samples from various companies, there’s a page devoted to the way hormones cross the placenta, allowing the unborn child to experience, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-abortion-reproductive-rights","category-feminism-sexism-etc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1883"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1883\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}