Tag Archives: pregnancy

Fat and 36 weeks pregnant and… ready for birth?? Pictures, pools, and ranting

Tonight the midwives dropped off the birth pool. As of today, if I go into labor, we’re not calling it premature, we’re not going to try to stop it, and, barring other indications, we’re not going to the hospital.

Give me a moment to boggle, run around in a panic, and faint from all there is left to do.

…

!!!!!!

_______

Ok, back now.

Fat and pregnant: 36 weeks

Ignore the confident expression: I’m too stunned to realize I should be panicking.¹^,²

One of the many reasons I love and appreciate the midwives model of care is the normalization of the wide range of experiences of humanity, and of pregnancy and birth in particular. Midwives, in general (and as allowed by law, by which they are often, instead, constrained), would not induce at 36 or 37 weeks — but neither would they immediately call spontaneous labor at those gestational ages “abnormal” or pathological. Similarly, midwives not bound by laws on gestational length rarely are concerned by 41 or 42 (or, depending, 43 or 44) week pregnancies.

Those who do not follow the midwifery model of care, whether they name it such or not, are much more likely to have a narrow range of non-pathological — and, conversely, be much more willing to interfere in the biological process, with the assumption that whatever complications might be introduced by such interference they can “manage”.

What is the point of this?

We are finding out³ that when it comes to pre-term inductions⁴, it simply isn’t so. When we induce large number of babies at (what we believe to be⁵) 37 weeks of pregnancy, more babies get sick. More babies spend time in the (expensive and traumatic) NICU⁶. More babies have breastfeeding problems. Likely, more babies die.

That is all old news to a birth geek like yours truly: the more we interfere without needful reason, the more problems we introduce. (Even when we interfere with compelling need, we introduce problems, but the balance of good can be on the side of intervening.) No, what makes me rant is the headline this “news” is appearing under:

Doctors To Pregnant Women: Wait At Least 39 Weeks

If you don’t see why this makes my eye twitch and keeps my massage therapist permanently employed de-kinking my neck, let me explain:

It is, once again, women’s fault.

Nevermind that doctors⁷ were the ones who convinced women that inducing at 38, 37 weeks was just fine and perfectly safe. Nevermind that the majority of early inductions are based on medical advice and/or scare mongering. Nevermind the host of misogynist, anti-family, capitalist forces leading to women wanting to schedule a birth:

desire to have the attendant with whom they have built a relationship — which is no trivial reason! — in a system that devalues humanity and relationships in favor of maximum profitability; limited parental leave postpartum or limited medical leave prenatally; pressure from employers and the need to overcome the perceptions of the “mommy track”; need for community and familial support postpartum; limited community support or understanding for the normal discomforts and changes of pregnancy; and the list goes on…

No, it is, simply, always, women’s fault — this time for being silly, for being vain, for being ignorant, for being selfish. Nevermind also the breathtakingly beautiful and complex calculations all pregnant mammals engage in, often unconsciously, as we weigh the best good for our offspring (both in the moment and singularly, and in the long run and in aggregate)⁸: women, when it comes down to it, need to have our babies rescued from ourselves. Thank gods there are doctors.⁹

Or, for my part, thank gods and my many privileges — including living in Portland, Oregon aka Midwife Central — that I have access to alternatives, and the health necessary to enjoy them. While there is still so much to worry about — which house will I birth in? will we get our act in gear and get the tub liner and other supplies in time? am I going to get the professional pictures I so desire? is everything going to go well; will my baby be ok? — I don’t have to worry that my care providers will pathologize my experience, interfere needlessly, and blame me for any bad outcomes.

Leaving me free to enjoy this, likely final, pregnancy — however long it lasts.

The bump above my belly button? Baby butt.

Totally happy-bragging aside: there’s a “plus size women’s resale” store just half a mile from the Boychick’s new preschool — and, with luck, less than a mile from our new house — and I scored three new-to-me tops for pretty cheap there today, meaning I now have more than three dresses, one blouse, and two stolen-and-cut-up tshirts I can wear without flashing obnoxious belly panel everywhere. AND I got to support a local, fat-friendly establishment. Win all around! ↩
Aside the second: this taking pictures of myself thing really does get easier the more I do it. ↩
Or rather, the medical community is finally admitting. ↩
And, really, a whole slew of other interventions, but let’s focus on induction for now. ↩
I get very annoyed at comments like “without an ultrasound measurement in the first trimester, a woman’s due date could be as much as two weeks off”. No, without accurate dating, the “due date” could be inaccurate by days to weeks. But ultrasound is not the only method of accurate dating: I could tell you the exact date of ovulation for both the Boychick’s and this pregnancy, thank you charting. ↩
Neonatal intensive care unit. ↩
Here being used as shorthand for all those who attend birth under a more medical, and not midwifery, model of care. ↩
For more, see Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s Mother Nature. ↩
This is sarcasm. ↩

29 Comments | Posted on 3 August 2011 by Arwyn | Category: Body | Tags: birth, Fat is a feminist issue, homebirth, midwives, pictures, pregnancy

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Quick hit on paid parental leave

The kid just threw up. And this is why we need universal paid parental leave.

No really.

The kid just threw up, and his preschool has a 24-hours-without-vomiting rule. Which means he can’t go to his (long) day of preschool tomorrow. Which means I lose 6 of my weekly 10 work hours this week. Because I have to stay home with the kid.¹

Why?

I, being self-employed, don’t get any paid leave, so there’s no scrimping needed there², whereas we’re saving every minute of The Man’s paid time off we can for after the baby comes.³ So he can’t take tomorrow off (not even for a half day) as he used to do regularly when the Boychick was sick.

Just one tiny example from a relatively-privileged family, but still: my kid threw up, and this is why we need universal paid parental leave.

No, I can’t work while he’s home, even if I plant him in front of the TV. Ariel Gore wrote about distractability in How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead: when we can be distracted or interrupted, even if we’re not, we cannot really focus. Maybe not true for everyone, but absolutely true for me. This is yet another reason I do most of my writing at night, at the cost of my sleep (and thus why I’ve been doing so little writing recently, because sleep is, at this stage of pregnancy, far less sacrificeable). ↩
And not having a salary or a direct dollar-per-hour payback for my work — and, really, not getting paid much/anything for my work at the moment at all — it’s a lot easier on the budget to sacrifice my hours than his. This is not normally something we pay attention to, but when we’re trying to buy a house, pay the midwife, and save for the babymoon? Yeah, it does matter. ↩
And it still won’t be enough. With him having a “really great” salaried position, he’ll be able to go 40 hours in the hole on PTO, which means he’ll probably be paid for about 2 weeks off. And if we can, we’ll take another 2 off unpaid. I know to be able to do so, even potentially, is a sign we’re fucking privileged. But it’s still criminal that a new parent gets so little time. ↩

11 Comments | Posted on 25 July 2011 by Arwyn | Category: Kyriarchy, Parenting | Tags: class privilege, paid parental leave, pregnancy, Privilege, sick, USA

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Guest post: Sadness is my boychick (or girlchick)

Sadness is my boychick (or girlchick)

by Queen Emily

Bio: Queen Emily is an Australian trans woman in her early 30s, one of the co-bloggers at Questioning Transphobia and Hoyden About Town. She is quite amazing.

Title remixed from Lykke Li…

I know how the story is supposed to go, for a trans woman. It’s supposed to go from unbearable pain pre-transition to happiness post, a journey that culminates with SRS¹. This is the triumphant narrative the psychiatric/medical gatekeepers want, as proof of their success, and it’s a story we tell cis people in general to justify bodily interventions cissexists still find disturbing and fake at best and horrifying mutilation at worst. We’re supposed to be happy enough to live as a woman, to have the right body, to be accorded the minimal respect of a name and a pronoun (if not exactly full equality). And even trans positive discourses demand a certain positivity to address ciscentric narratives that value cis bodies more than trans, that objectify us as objects of mingled disgust and desire and utterly conflate femaleness with cis femaleness.

These are all true enough, but they’re incomplete. The pain Lisa talks about in the above Questioning Transphobia link continues to linger after transition. When it comes to trans people and reproduction, the predominant motifs continue to be assigned sex. In Western Australia, my home state, the government has been fighting through the courts for two years for the right to neatly align trans men’s sterility with their access to male legal sex documents (trans women’s sterility, however, which occurs permanently after approximately six months on estrogen, counts for precisely fuck all in gaining our access to the correct docs). Cis feminists have incorporated trans rights into pro-choice activism predominantly through the awareness of trans men and female-assigned genderqueers’ potential pregnancies. But these are all primarily concerned with assigned sex capabilities, treating trans populations as tacitly, implicitly, as “really” our assigned sexes.

Arch transphobe Germaine Greer has long had a riff where she declaims that no trans woman would possibly menstruate or get pregnant if it were physically possible. As Germaine appears to have never met a trans woman (her “research” wouldn’t deign to actually consult the population she so boldly declaims about), let me just say: it’s total bollocks. It fucking hurts that I can’t get pregnant.

This isn’t simply about being a parent. It is quite possible that my partner and I could have children one day — if her doctor says it’s safe with her disabilities we could go through IVF in Australia, and there’s surrogacy and adoption too (not that these are unproblematic by any means, just that there’s a possibility we could find an ethical solution). It’s not just about not having children — though it is undoubtedly part of it. And it’s not just about how society can use childlessness against women in general, or the links between homophobia and reproduction (ie the line of reasoning that says gay marriages aren’t “real” because there’s no potential of “natural” childbearing), or even how infertility has been specifically used against trans women (“sterile fucktoys” is one particularly charming epithet I’ve encountered from radfems).

But that doesn’t quite get at the pain I’m describing. When I say hurts, I don’t mean metaphorically. I feel this inability of my body in my body, feel the wordless dull ache in my stomach, inside where my uterus should be, between my legs. It’s there in the strain of muscles, the odd twitch. Between them, my cousins have had three babies (all female-assigned) in the last few years, and my sister and her partner are gearing up some of their own. Sometimes it’s hard to be around, because I am envious, and there’s no cultural space for me to say so without it reinforcing my own supposed inferiority as a trans woman.²

Without fail, I clutch a hand to my tummy when I see them, to feel that pain, but also to feel the could-have-been, the should-have-been. I can’t explain why it’s there, any more than I explain the feeling-not-feeling sensation of my body before hormones. It doesn’t make sense, because it is sense. So what I’m saying is there’s a history and a geography of loss and inability written into my sense of my lived body. It doesn’t overwhelm me, but it’s there when I’m alone as much as the times someone close to me has a child. It just is, and I expect it may well always be in some form.

The thing is, if there’s loss, then there must be mourning too; if you have grief, then you’re already grieving. Freud changed his mind several times on when mourning is accomplished. At first he thought that mourning is completed when a new love object is found, when devotion has been transferred to another love object. And it’s true — love helps you heal from pain. Seeing my friends and family happy with their pregnancies and their children, babysitting those children, is a joy.

But it is nevertheless bittersweet. Emotions don’t cancel or replace each other, as Freud imagined early on. Later he suggested that mourning finishes in incorporation, when you’ve incorporated the lost loved object into yourself. In her wonderful book Precarious Life, Judith Butler suggests that mourning is “when one accepts that by the loss one undergoes one will be changed, possibly for ever.” Mourning is accomplished by transformation, a transformation that “cannot be charted or planned in advance,” because one can never truly know who one is or will be.

And this, to come full circle to my title, is where I’m at. Sadness, loss, grief, are a part of me, incorporated into my sense of myself, my body, my family, in contradictory and ambivalent ways. Sadness is my child, and that’s ok.

Ed note: Sex Reassignment Surgery. ↩
Arwyn style footnote: cis women, please stop saying “you’re so lucky not to have periods!” to trans women. You may as well just punch me in the stomach. ↩

13 Comments | Posted on 29 June 2011 by Arwyn | Category: Body, Guest Posts, Kyriarchy, Parenting | Tags: infertility, Menstruation, motherhood, pregnancy, trans, transmisogyny

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Whose uterus is it? A poem and a polemic

Flipping, squirming, hiccuping being inside
me
my
belly moves, bulges, requires
tables to be shifted
my
body to be shifted
my
gait and stride and way
I
move through the world
to be shifted
to make room, one day, for
not-me

*****

Whose uterus is it?

Increasingly, it seems, not the person in whose body it resides, not when US states have to debate — though most aren’t even doing that — whether to compensate women they insulted and forcibly sterilized, when pregnant athletes are banned from sports, when, not long-ago but right now, women face murder charges for pregnancy or neonatal losses, when women are being stripped of rights and social supports and we can’t even get the powers that be to acknowledge this systematic attack.

There are two unique genetic signatures here in this chair, but only one body. Two heartbeats, but one flesh that interacts with the world. The person-ification of the parasite within me, the extent to which I am I-and-other, is for me to decide — not strangers who wish to rub my belly, not family who speak of “our baby”, not governments who would criminalize my choices not for their effect on my fellow citizens but for perceived damage to the flesh-in-and-of-my-flesh.

I am not heartless, not lacking in sentimentality, not ignorant of the profundity of the person-creation that is procreation, of the of-me-but-not-me-ness of the being within me. But as long as it is within me, sustained by me, symbiotic with me as no other stage of existence can be; as long as this is so, no one has the right to dictate or regulate my rights, my choices, my self as though it is not my body who will bear those burdens.

Because, whatever you may say, it is my uterus.