Our cultural discomfort with reproductive health and the female sex is harming and misinforming us. Our unbalanced and disparate coverage and knowledge of what pregnancy and childbirth entail leave many of those who go through it feeling unprepared.
Yet, we tend to either over- or under-sell what childbirth is really like. More than half of the people in the United States identify as women, and even with the declining birth rate, many plan to experience pregnancy and childbirth.
University of Minnesota nursing student Reagan Rogers said she has seen expecting patients be completely blindsided by the process.
“It’s kind of a shell shock from what I’ve seen, at least in, like, my clinical experience,” Rogers said. “They sometimes don’t really know what they’ve gotten themselves into.”
Certified professional midwife of 10 years and co-director of Roots Community Birth Center, Rachel Voigt, said giving birth always presents surprises to clients, even if they have had multiple pregnancies before.
“Most people aren’t prepared to give birth because it’s such a kind of wild and unpredictable life event that has such a wide range of normal,” Voigt said.
There has long been a stigma associated with the female sex and anatomy more generally, but particularly regarding sexual and reproductive health. The first pregnancy shown on sitcom television was in the early 1950s on “I Love Lucy.”
It was an uphill battle to allow the visibly pregnant Lucille Ball on air in the first place, and because the word “pregnant” was not allowed to be said on air, Ball’s character was referred to as “expectant.”
This stigma’s legacy lives on in our willful ignorance of the subject. Sex education programs vary by state, and only half the population currently in school is receiving bare-minimum sex education, according to a Rutgers researcher.
Rogers said pregnancy and childbirth, along with women’s health in general, aren’t taught equitably or comprehensively in educational settings. This stems from the fact that female anatomy and physiology aren’t studied enough.
“Not only are we not teaching it, but the research really isn’t there,” Rogers said.
Mainstream media portrayals of birth tend to vary greatly as well.
Rogers added that pregnancy and childbirth are misrepresented on television in particular.
“It seems like this beautiful, wonderful thing that, like, doesn’t really affect a person,” Rogers said. “Then they have this baby, and then childbirth was super easy and everyone was perfect.”
Voigt said she once sent an email to “Grey’s Anatomy” creator and producer Shonda Rhimes after seeing an episode she felt showed pregnancy in a needlessly gruesome way.
“Inaccurate portrayals of pregnancy and birth on mainstream TV are anti-feminist and doing a disservice to pregnant people by fear-mongering and portraying things so wildly inaccurately,” Voigt said.
Stories shared online by celebrities and everyday people alike recall experiences of hair falling out in clumps, tooth loss, vaginal tearing and varicose veins, just to name a few examples. Popular narratives about the risks of pregnancy are often sensational and center on the ways that one’s body might become disfigured or less socially valuable than before pregnancy.
A viral concern for expecting people nowadays, as shown in before-and-after photos on platforms like TikTok and Instagram, is pregnancy nose, wherein a person’s nose swells in size, most noticeably toward the end of the third trimester.
This is seemingly a reaction to how serious risks and outcomes alongside pregnancy tend to be glossed over culturally. The sensational nature of these side effects draws curious viewers in and, given our low health literacy, paints a terrifying image of what pregnancy entails.
Many concerns about side effects are also aesthetically centered. Women are faced with the pressure to snap back to a pre-pregnancy weight and mommy makeovers have established a foothold in the cosmetic surgery industry.
When accurate narratives are not portrayed, cases of rare or extreme health complications may be rendered more common than they would be otherwise. Why is it that a significant medical event, huge health risk and the reason for our species’ survival is so widely misrepresented and still somewhat misunderstood in the general population?
Voigt said she works to handle the real risks with care, while still being honest and accurate with clients.
“For example, if the stillbirth rate after 41 weeks of gestation doubles, that sounds like a really big deal,” Voigt said. “But what the statistic really says is that the stillbirth rate goes from 0.5 per 100 people to one per 100 people, so it’s still a small chance. However, it’s a significant life event if someone were to experience that.”
We owe it to ourselves to comprehensively research and learn about the effects of pregnancy to provide the most accurate and nuanced information and depictions of what creating life really entails.
Fearmongering does not help anybody, nor does ignoring what risks there are. People deserve to know what they are getting themselves into, to prepare and act accordingly in order to properly expect the unexpected.
