Maternity Prayer
So yeah… as part of my work as a professional UX researcher, I‘ve gotten to spend the last many months researching every aspect of how Women’s Health care is delivered. And it’s brought up some feels — which led to this poem. Enjoy.
They never told me that every sneeze would become an adventure.
See, when you’re born with a womb and you fill it,
like you’re supposed to,
your organs move around to make room for the tiny being you’ve donated your body to gestate.
As the fetus evolves from blueberry
to avocado
to papaya
and then pumpkin — why are they always measured in produce? -
abdominal walls cleave open to make room for your expanding uterus.
Your intestines migrate upward to your lungs,
making it hard to breathe and to sleep
and everything — I mean everything — pushes. on. your fucking. bladder.
When finally the baby arrives
on a river of shit
and blood
and screaming,
for a moment, after they clean her off, you get to hold her —
this gorgeous little miracle you sacrificed everything to create.
See, we’re taught to focus on the miracle part.
Never mind the padded underwear and ice packs you wear
for a week after delivery
while your uterus bleeds out and your body reels
from the trauma of having a tiny human torn out of it.
Pay no mind to the litany of changes your body and mind go through
during every stage of pregnancy and its aftermath —
and definitely don’t think about
the myriad of ways that being a pregnant woman
can actually kill you.
Just be grateful for the 12 weeks you get (if you’re lucky)
to get that mind and body back in working order once that baby is born,
because honey — your coworkers already resent you for taking the time off.
See, we’re taught to believe that this is all natural, what a woman’s body is made to do — the ways in which it breaks us is all part of God’s plan.
So our legislators make choices
like trying to outlaw ending a pregnancy,
no matter why a mother might need to.
We short-change postpartum care
and refuse to guarantee paid parental leave,
leaving mothers with depression,
chronic pain from poorly healed scars,
and the need to always bring an extra pair of underwear
in case we sneeze,
or jump,
or live our lives a bit too “out loud.”
James Marion Sims carved the field of gynecology
into the bodies of enslaved women, forcing them to endure
the earliest gynecological procedures— including C-Sections —
with no lube
and no anesthesia.
We have birthed a legacy
of women’s suffering and pain
being minimized — if not ignored completely —
to such a degree that 125 of every 100,000 live births in the United States
results in the death of a mother, and 70 of those mothers are Black.
Now I will never regret the choice I made to give life to my two children.
But I will always be grateful that it was, in fact, my choice to make,
and that I could make it when I was ready — emotionally and financially—
to live with the outcome, even knowing the scars it would give me.
My prayer for you, my fellow Americans,
is to stop focusing on the miracle part
and to accept the reality that pregnancy and childbirth
is brutally
fucking
hard and that nobody —
No.
Body.
should be forced to live with a pregnancy that will break them.
If you want to learn more about the dark side of gynecology and maternal health, visit these resources:
- PBS Newshour, Alabama artist works to correct historical narrative around beginnings of gynecology. February 2023.
- More than Tours, civil rights tours out of Montgomery AL featuring artist Michelle Browder’s amazing Mothers of Gynecology monument.
- CDC’s 2021 statistics on maternal mortality rates.
- Cooper Owens, Deirdre. 2017. Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology.
