Will the seemingly simple pre-birth statement “all I want is a healthy baby” be weaponized against women?
Turned into a “isn’t this what you want?” – an excuse to double down on exerting what it means to be a mother in the scope of a certain political agenda. A tool for benevolent sexism. An excuse to increasingly ignore women’s health needs, provide zero support, and make it seem like self sacrifice was their idea all along.
We are in an era of research on women’s health and health equity stopping or at least slowing as funding gets stripped away, increasingly aggressive attacks on body autonomy with wide-ranging repercussions on maternal healthcare access, and general misogyny flooding every system and skewing the way this country values women and their bodies. And then the real kicker – none of the factors that influence maternal health and maternal mortality rates will be reflected in the data because now THE DATA ARE NOT BEING COLLECTED.
Needless to say, I am feeling an urgency to hold the line and keep this course correction going in the right direction.
How do we do that? Well, I’m sticking with what we might actually have some control over these days – cultural narrative.
Let’s talk about a better way of centering the mother in the perinatal journey and how to set a better risk:risk analysis when it comes to how we discuss priorities for mom and baby’s health.
Links:
’s book — Invisible Labor: The Untold Story of the Cesarean Section.’s book — The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to Be a Good MomInterview with Dr. Karen Sheffield Abdullah on stress and the Black maternal health crisis.
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