Bring back confinement and allow pregnant women to suffer in peace. And with servants.
I’m fairly ambivalent about the news that the Duchess of Cambridge is pregnant. It’s welcome news for them but has very little relevance to my life.
I do feel sorry, however, to hear she has been hospitalised with hyperemisis gravidarum, an excessive form of sickness beyond the common symptom of morning sickness. Sufferers often can’t even keep water down which is obviously a worry when someone is pregnant.
“Pregnancy isn’t a illness” I often hear, usually from men, and usually right after they have finished telling me that their wife cycled right up until the day she gave birth.
Well, I’d like to counter the notion that pregnancy isn’t an illness. Yes, there are some people who suffer no symptoms, experience increased energy and even “bloom”. But every pregnancy is different. Mine wasn’t even a difficult pregnancy and I suffered many problems.
First there was the morning sickness. If you’ve never suffered the best way I can describe it is like a hangover, nausea, headache interspersed with raging hunger for very specific food stuffs. A hunger that if not satisfied in the space of 10 minutes turns back into stomach churning nausea. I remember crying in the middle of Waitrose because they didn’t have the pasta sauce I was craving. Fortunately it was Waitrose where crying is considered mildly eccentric. If it was Asda, which is my post-children haunt, they might have called social services. If you felt that sick outside of pregnancy you wouldn’t be expected to go to work and function normally. But pregnancy isn’t an illness!
Then there are the cramps; shooting pains through your calf waking you from an already fitful sleep straight into excruciating agony. That’s when you are not suffering from insomnia which makes you bone shatteringly tired. And tearful. I cried on the pharmacist in Boots when she refused to sell me even a herbal sleeping aid. “It’s preparation for when the baby comes” people would say without a trace of irony. I didn’t need preparation, I needed more than 3 hours sleep a night to prepare myself for getting no more than 3 hours sleep a night for the three months after the baby was born. If you can sleep between the cramps and the insomnia is a broken by a constant urge to wee, and every time you get out of bed, or just want to turn over a military operation ensues to reposition multitudinous pillows holding up the sagging parts of your body.
Another early pregnancy ailment I had was sacroiliac joint problems. When you become pregnant all of your ligaments soften which mean it is easy to damage them. At one point, even before I weighed the same as a baby elephant, I could barely put my feet on the ground because of the pain in my sacroiliac joint. I rather embarrassingly had to be rescued from a residential course I was on with work, by my mum!
Heartburn, piles, itchy skin, not to mention a mental health so fragile you make Michael Jackson look normal. Plus the heart stopping fear that grips you when you worry that something might go wrong. Then the equally blood chilling fear when you thing that what if it actually all does go right and you end up with a baby – then what the frig do you do?
So you’ve carried round a squirming parasite using just your abdominal muscles for 9 months. Then you have to get said parasite out of your body. I’m not going to dwell on the excruciating pain and fear that often accompanies labour, suffice to say for those who have never tried it, imagine pushing an orange up your nostril and you have an approximation of the experience. “That’s they call it labour dear” is a favoured quote from a midwife.
Finally, many people forget that after labour there is the recovery, often major stitching right on the most delicate of body parts, those you spend a lot of time resting your weight on. Or in the case of c sections you learn just how much you used those stomach muscles on a day to day basis for things like getting out of bad. And coughing. Ah yes, coughing and sneezing. Best not to risk either with a full bladder after pregnancy has had its way with your pelvic floor. Oh how we laugh at the Tena Lady adverts. Less funny when you quite literally crap your knickers in front of your husband because things ain’t holding up down there any more.
I paint a bleak picture of pregnancy don’t I? I’m sure there are some positives to it, but I can’t really think of any right now. Except I recently saw a picture of myself when I was pregnant and my skin and hair looked AMAZING. But I totally didn’t appreciate it because I was spending most of the time trying not to vomit. Or fall asleep in the loos at work (don’t get me started on my irrational fear of going into labour at work.
Everyone’s experience is different, some people will sail through pregnancy, making those of us who suffered with it feel pretty crap and inadequate. All I ask is that people remember that growing a life inside of us is a pretty complicated and exhausting business with many complications, some which I have not even mentioned. I hope that the media leave the Duchess of Cambridge to herself during this time, and refrain from commenting on her behaviour, her appearance, and other private matters surrounding her body. To be admitted to hospital for hyperemisis is no laughing matter, she must be feeling dreadful. And the knowledge that cameras and journalists are camped outside the hospital must just be adding to the stress.
As for me, would I do pregnancy again? Not if I can help it. I loathed every minute of it. Was it worth it? Absolutely. I have two amazing miracles of nature that I grew for nine months and fed exclusively for 6 months after that, carrying on nursing till they were both over 13 months.
But pregnancy is not an illness? My torn and sewn up back side it’s not.
Dilly Tante 
Well said (as ever)
Spoken like a true mother xxx
Oh, you just brought it all rolling back to me there. I shall now go to bed feeling SO HAPPY I’m not pregnant. And that’s from me, a woman who actually enjoyed (most) of my two pregnancies. But the nausea, oh the nausea… (falls off chair as a wave of flashback weakness strikes)…
Hello!
Just popping on really quickly because it is plainly rude to tweet that you disagree and then not explain why!
Loved reading it, as I always do with every post, and was gobsmacked that you have something to say that didn’t have me nodding right along 🙂
In my opinion, you see, history tells us that it is MANS involvement in the labour and birth movement that has caused so many problems for women.
It was men coming along (and in many countries still is the case – for example the States) and saying “You are ill” that caused a power imbalance for pregnant women, that took it out of their hands, that made intervention the norm, which allowed FEAR to become the predominant factor and therefore pain to be the primary feeling associated with pregnancy and birth.
I see that you had quite a traumatic pregnancy, and some women do, and it must feel like an illness. But this is not the case for most and classing pregnancy as an illness causes a whole host of problems.
For many women pregnancy is a pleasure, and interference with it – and the lack of choice that comes along with that interference (getting sent letters telling you when to arrive for unnecessary scans and blood tests etc)- is a serious feminist issue. I loved my pregnancy and rejected the myriads of people who wanted to take the power I felt as an emerging mother away.
I don’t mention it to make you feel inadequate, but I feel that too often pregnancy, labour and post natal period is spoken of in negative terms like this and it creates a self-perpetuating cycle of fear. Programmes like One Born Every Minute show us that womankind has an unnatural and debilitating fear of it all. Some of us (and there are not many saying it – no one dares confess positive bith stories these days, apart from online!) need to express that this does not have to be the case for most women!
I feel like women must claim back the pregnancy and labour movement from the establishment, and key to this is saying “We all have different pregnancies and each one requires a different response – when illness comes with it, women need support, but unless there are problematic symptoms leave us alone!”
Once again it is about women having choice.
PS I had to laugh, I, er, did cycle up until my first contraction HAHAHA for me that was sticking my fingers up at the crowds who felt I should be lying in bed all weak and disempowered.
Thanks for the interesting comment. I completely get what you are saying & agree with most of it. I even did the natural birth thing, no drugs, & second one was at home with minimal help (midwife read magazines through most of it!).
But I will never embrace pregnancy and labour with anything other than loathing, but I don’t doubt much of it is to do with crowbarring it into our western/capitalist/patriarchal ways.
Funny how you feel there aren’t allowed to be positive pregnancy & birth stories. I felt the opposite. Well, not so much with labour, but I felt like saying how much I hated being pregnant was a massive taboo, and was determined to break that. I even had a woman in my yoga class tell me I’d never bond with my baby if I couldn’t bond with it while pregnant. I cried at that too!
Anyway, thanks for the comment. It’s good to have balance.
I think the reason everyone tells you that pregnancy is not an illness is because it isn’t, it’s a natural state which is sabotaged by male control of it as lulastic says, but it does cause illness, short, medium and long term, which people simply don’t want to acknowledge.
The one thing women can do which men can’t, the thing which made them want to enslave us in the first place, is something that must always be undermined, attacked and controlled. In the Western world, women were not allowed in church, to take communion etc., because they were dirty; that’s what pregnancy does, you see, it contaminates your already filthy feminine body. In some patriarchal religions women still have to take a ritual bath after giving birth to symbolise the cleaning away of all that disgusting, icky female birthy stuff.
Throughout history they’ve come up with other ways to punish our ability to bear life – control it, force women to give birth in more painful positions, humiliate them while doing so, police what they eat and drink and how they behave during pregnancy, make it impossible for them to breastfeed their baby without embarrassment or conflict once the baby is born; and above all, minimise and sneer at the very real problems of pregnancy, pretend that women who do suffer the sometimes very serious side-effects are just spoilt princesses and use their pregnancies as yet another opportunity to remind women that we’re just not good enough.
Really good comment, thanks.
There’s no need for the natural condition=good/illness=bad dichotomy. Many natural conditions (off the top of my head – puberty, menstruation, menopause, old age) are not entirely fun, without actually being illnesses.