No One Tells You the Full Truth About Pregnancy and Childbirth
Do our doctors lack the empathy to warn us? Are women trying to not scare each other?
In Depth
Illustration: Vicky Leta
When I was pregnant with my daughter two years ago, I was a borderline psychotic consumer of pregnancy-related literature. I was riveted by the process my body was undergoing. I felt like a sorceress and a science project.
My bookshelf transformed into a library about what to expect or not to expect or why those other books about expectations were wrong. I hired a doula, whom I was in contact with almost daily. I texted with friends who had small children and communicated with other first-time mothers through my newsletter. I became an encyclopedia of Weird Shit About Pregnancy. I could bring any conversation to a screeching halt by pointing out that at least a pound of the weight gained during a typical pregnancy is blood, because when you’re pregnant, your body makes a ton of extra blood. Isn’t that gross? Isn’t that cool?
But there is so much that the give-it-to-me-straight, medically informed literature didn’t tell me about pregnancy, birth, and the first months of motherhood. Culture-wide, there’s even more that gets minimized or glossed over. So few pregnant people—even those of us who go in armed with as much information as possible—are prepared for what actually happens.
I was not prepared for how much of pregnancy and childbirth seems to just be doctors trying stuff out. Considering how common childbirth is, the amount that the medical community still does not understand about pregnancy is staggering, and so much of what it thinks it does understand was informed by a gynecological history of patriarchal, racist, and misogynist beliefs about women’s bodies. The literature I read explaining symptoms a person could experience during or after pregnancy could be boiled down to: “Here’s a symptom. It could just be a regular thing, or it could mean that you and your baby are going to die. Better call your doctor to be sure.” But when you call your doctor, your doctor is like, yeah, keep an eye on it and go to the ER if it gets worse. When you go to the emergency room, unless you’re hemorrhaging or literally crowning, they usually send you home and tell you to call your doctor. Seeking medical care while pregnant, even under the best of circumstances, is like being stuck inside of the Spectrum customer service phone menu as you try desperately to speak to a human. And then, even when you get somebody on the line, the answer is usually “you’re probably fine.”
Pregnancy: You’re Probably Fine.
I had an easy pregnancy, comparatively. I didn’t get morning sickness. I had a strong aversion to sardines, and the only reason I found out I couldn’t eat them was because I read an article about how sardines are a nutritious treat packed with vitamins and minerals that fetuses just love, so I made a whole sardine-centric recipe only to realize as it filled my home with a fishy aroma that this was my appetite’s limit.
I was in a great mood 75 percent of the time. My fatigue was not debilitating. My extremities didn’t swell. I was dealt a good hand physically; I had one of those cute little pregnancies where even at the very end I looked like I’d swallowed a basketball. My worst symptoms were persistent, painful leg cramps that would wake me up in the middle of most nights, the discouraging addition of prominent varicose veins to my lower legs, and the fact that the 25 percent of the time that I was not in a great mood, I was crying. And every time I brushed my teeth or flossed, I’d bleed so much that my sink would look like an OR from The Knick. And then there were the random, horrifying nosebleeds; the psychedelic, nonstop, occasionally horrifying dreams; the general feeling of visibility and vulnerability when I’d go out in public, or buckle myself into a car that was designed to save human lives by crash testing primarily man-sized dummies; and the fact that for the first half of the pregnancy, my placenta covered my cervix, which meant that a doctor told me not to have sex until the situation resolved itself months later. I had no idea that a prescription for “no sex” was something that might happen during pregnancy, one of the only times in a woman’s life when she can just have unprotected sex with abandon because you can’t get double pregnant! But other than that, pregnancy was great.
I wonder if medical professionals don’t have enough empathy for their patients to convey how life-interrupting childbirth can be, or if those of us who have given birth are afraid to scare people.
Most mothers I know had a much worse time. A friend had morning sickness so bad that she couldn’t get out of bed some days; another could only keep down chicken-flavored ramen and ginger candy. A tiny woman who, despite all of her efforts to eat healthy and stay active during her pregnancy, gained 80 pounds and developed gestational diabetes and had to work for years to regain her pre-pregnancy health. A woman I know had so much anxiety around pregnancy loss after a stillbirth years ago that her doctor recommended an elective C-section three weeks before her due date (pregnancy loss is another thing that leaves women feeling alone). I’ve spoken to women who fell into barely manageable states of antenatal depression, but researchers have done very little to look into mental health solutions that are safe for pregnant women.
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