Keep Your Politics Off Our Uteri Please
At the start of this week, I shared a cute little quote graphic with a quote from Gloria Steinem that was “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off” and when I shared it, I thought, hmmm….I love this quote, but I am not sure it is relevant at this exact moment. And then around my bedtime here on the East Coast, my partner turned to me and said, “Just got a breaking news report from The Times, and you are not going to like it”. And in one instant, the earlier quote I shared became relevant with a leaked SCOTUS draft about roe v. wade. And I am now feeling both free and pissed off, and I know I am not alone.
The free part is that I am in a place in my life (and my business) where I feel very free to share my opinion about most things and I am not afraid of how it will affect either. I know several business owners who would not want to align with a particular political stance as they want to remain an inclusive space. But now that I am really thinking about it, this was much more of a thought before the pandemic and the death of George Floyd, and the Black Lives Matter Movement last summer. I think businesses have mostly gotten aboard the bus of sharing their values, and realizing that they matter to consumers. I know that sharing my thoughts and my feelings about what is happening in our world will only help to align me with my ideal clients and my dream students. I become a magnet for the people that want to come to my party.
A little bit of background about why I feel the way that I do. About 15 years ago, I was finishing my training to become a childbirth educator. The facilitator told us, as aspiring childbirth educators, that we needed to check our bias about what we think birth should be like, or what our birth was like, or what we “believe” to be important and simply provide information. This was really thought provoking for me. I wanted to become a birth educator because I was passionate about it–and I had a VERY DEFINED way that I thought it should be. However, I actually followed this advice over the 14 years that I taught Childbirth Education classes and it was very freeing. I never talked about my own personal experience, and I never told women what my birth experience was like, or what I thought was best. Technically, that was my opinion. My opinion doesn’t matter when I am working to be of service to women and their partners. I certainly wanted to normalize natural birth or birthing in a way that was slightly outside of the realm of the western medical model of care, but I learned to shelve my own bias and my opinions. Letting go of your opinion and your bias is very freeing. To be able to hold space for others, and to really serve them–we need to follow the advice of my birth educator training teacher, and check our bias at the door.
As the owner of a uterus and ovaries, I have been able to observe over my lifetime, many of the ways in which we are controlled and hindered because we are born female. This could be the “piss you off” part, for sure. When we are adolescents, menstruation begins. Menstruation can be something that is both joyful and marks a huge change in life, but also can be a hindrance. Many girls (yes, even in the United States of America) have to miss school because they cannot afford period products, and so we now have young people lobbying to get period products provided at schools for free–just like toilet paper.
Then there is the baby-making phase of life, in which our ovaries and uterus go through the roller coaster of loads of estrogen and then less so as you make a baby or two and go on the ride of new parenthood. We have inequitable care in our country where black women are THREE TIMES as likely to die during childbirth as are white women. This alone is cause for much alarm, discourse and questioning into our healthcare system. Maternal and infant morbidity and mortality rates are highest in poor black and brown counties in states like Louisiana, Georgia, Indiana and New Jersey. This is clearly a systemic issue and many believe it begins in our treatment of black women from adolescence.
Menopause and the dip in our ovaries’ production of estrogen brings it’s own challenges such as trouble sleeping, problems with memory or concentration, and anxiety or depression, as well as low mood–all of which affect our careers during a time when we could be experiencing a peak in responsibility, status and earning potential. We haven’t even really begun to discuss this here in the United States, though in the UK, women are getting legislation passed that provides free HRT for all women that want it, along with training to care providers on the safety and efficacy of HRT which helps to dispel the long held myths about using HRT and it’s possible complications or dangers for women (which are inaccurate, btw). Women in the UK have also very recently had the benefit of legislature being passed that not only protects a woman from discrimination in the workplace due to menopuse, but allows them to take time off as needed without fear of it hurting their career. It has been noted that women in their late 40’s and early 50’s have been resigning from their careers in record numbers in the UK, which led to this legislative proposal and process.
I would like to circle back to feeling free to express my feelings, thoughts and opinions. I am reminded of my birth education teacher-trainer’s words long ago about keeping my birth story for me (or close friends and confidants), and not sharing my opinion about the way that I “felt birth should be” or what “my birth was like.” This was shared with the intention of supporting women by allowing them to have their own experience of birth–without the need to feel like their experience was somehow lacking or less than, or missing something because it was not like my own experience. It matters not what I would do in their situation, or what I felt was “right” or “wrong” for ANY WOMAN that I had the honor to support, guide and educate about the birth process. My role as their care provider was to be of support to that woman regardless of whatever her decision about her own body was.
And I continue to take on that role in my work as I support women in perimenopause –there are debates about Hormone Replacement Therapy and women using natural methods of support for changing hormones. I even had one holistic health practitioner say to me “When I went through my own menopause, I just accepted that this was a natural phase of my life and I don’t need to change anything. This thought process would be so helpful to all women.” (She was basically telling me how I should support women in menopause. Her way, of course. Ugh.)
This is just one example of how we want to tell other women how they should experience their bodies and what they should do with their body, or how they should feel about their body. Nobody should feel the need or desire to tell any other person what they should do with their own body, it matters not what you believe in. It’s time to keep our politics and our religious beliefs off of our uteri –and I do mean collective uteri–as in all womens’ uteri.
How about we just believe in a womans’ autonomy? Period. End of conversation.
