Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
Since the silly transphobic polls are happening atm and just asked if men can get pregnant, here’s a local story I really love to remind you that yes, men do give birth, and they deserve the best of care. It’s happening no matter what a few loud twitter transphobes are saying, we are out there thriving and creating wonderful families. A vast majority of the responses were extremely positive too <3
In case you missed it, the almighty and just state of Texas just passed this… TXSB 25 which says that a no legal recourse may be brought against a physician who withholds information about a woman’s pregnancy that may influence her decision to abort.
WHICH MEANS if you, or your girlfriend, wife, etc, gets pregnant with a child with a condition (that would cause the poor child to be born with a defect that would probably result in death, anyway) your doctor can decide to just NOT SAY ANYTHING to you about it. You could go to full term and give birth only to have your child die within hours, with no warning, and then you cannot even take action for reparations.
Get multiple opinions and research your physicians, folks.
A new surgery could allow transgender women to become pregnant. A clinic in Ohio recently started screening women for the ground-breaking procedure, which would allow women to transplant their uterus into a woman who doesn’t have one. The transplant could be conducted on a woman ‘born without a uterus, or who had it removed or …
“A clinic in Ohio recently started screening women for the ground-breaking procedure, which would allow women to transplant their uterus into a woman who doesn’t have one.
The transplant could be conducted on a woman ‘born without a uterus, or who had it removed or have uterine damage’ – this would make trans women eligible for the procedure.
A 26-year-old woman who is undergoing the screening process told The Times: ‘I crave that experience.
‘I want the morning sickness, the backaches, the feet swelling. I want to feel the baby move. That is something I’ve wanted for as long as I can remember.’
Dr Christine McGinn, a plastic surgeon, told Yahoo News: ‘The human drive to be a mother for a woman is a very serious thing.
‘Transgender women are no different.’”
Medical miracle.
I’d donate mine :) I’m not using it.
I will happily donate my uterus to a trans woman in need as soon as this procedure is confirmed as safe.
Suzanne Sadedin, Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from Monash University
I’m so glad you asked. Seriously. The answer to this question is one of the most illuminating and disturbing stories in human evolutionary biology, and almost nobody knows about it. And so, O my friends, gather close, and hear the extraordinary tale of:
HOW THE WOMAN GOT HER PERIOD
Contrary to popular belief, most mammals do not menstruate. In fact, it’s a feature exclusive to the higher primates and certain bats*. What’s more, modern women menstruate vastly more than any other animal. And it’s bloody stupid (sorry). A shameful waste of nutrients, disabling, and a dead giveaway to any nearby predators. To understand why we do it, you must first understand that you have been lied to, throughout your life, about the most intimate relationship you will ever experience: the mother-fetus bond.
Isn’t pregnancy beautiful? Look at any book about it. There’s the future mother, one hand resting gently on her belly. Her eyes misty with love and wonder. You sense she will do anything to nurture and protect this baby. And when you flip open the book, you read about more about this glorious symbiosis, the absolute altruism of female physiology designing a perfect environment for the growth of her child.
If you’ve actually been pregnant, you might know that the real story has some wrinkles. Those moments of sheer unadulterated altruism exist, but they’re interspersed with weeks or months of overwhelming nausea, exhaustion, crippling backache, incontinence, blood pressure issues and anxiety that you’ll be among the 15% of women who experience life-threatening complications.
From the perspective of most mammals, this is just crazy. Most mammals sail through pregnancy quite cheerfully, dodging predators and catching prey, even if they’re delivering litters of 12. So what makes us so special? The answer lies in our bizarre placenta. In most mammals, the placenta, which is part of the fetus, just interfaces with the surface of the mother’s blood vessels, allowing nutrients to cross to the little darling. Marsupials don’t even let their fetuses get to the blood: they merely secrete a sort of milk through the uterine wall. Only a few mammalian groups, including primates and mice, have evolved what is known as a “hemochorial” placenta, and ours is possibly the nastiest of all.
Inside the uterus we have a thick layer of endometrial tissue, which contains only tiny blood vessels. The endometrium seals off our main blood supply from the newly implanted embryo. The growing placenta literally burrows through this layer, rips into arterial walls and re-wires them to channel blood straight to the hungry embryo. It delves deep into the surrounding tissues, razes them and pumps the arteries full of hormones so they expand into the space created. It paralyzes these arteries so the mother cannot even constrict them.
What this means is that the growing fetus now has direct, unrestricted access to its mother’s blood supply. It can manufacture hormones and use them to manipulate her. It can, for instance, increase her blood sugar, dilate her arteries, and inflate her blood pressure to provide itself with more nutrients. And it does. Some fetal cells find their way through the placenta and into the mother’s bloodstream. They will grow in her blood and organs, and even in her brain, for the rest of her life, making her a genetic chimera**.
This might seem rather disrespectful. In fact, it’s sibling rivalry at its evolutionary best. You see, mother and fetus have quite distinct evolutionary interests. The mother ‘wants’ to dedicate approximately equal resources to all her surviving children, including possible future children, and none to those who will die. The fetus ‘wants’ to survive, and take as much as it can get. (The quotes are to indicate that this isn’t about what they consciously want, but about what evolution tends to optimize.)
There’s also a third player here – the father, whose interests align still less with the mother’s because her other offspring may not be his. Through a process called genomic imprinting, certain fetal genes inherited from the father can activate in the placenta. These genes ruthlessly promote the welfare of the offspring at the mother’s expense.
How did we come to acquire this ravenous hemochorial placenta which gives our fetuses and their fathers such unusual power? Whilst we can see some trend toward increasingly invasive placentae within primates, the full answer is lost in the mists of time. Uteri do not fossilize well.
The consequences, however, are clear. Normal mammalian pregnancy is a well-ordered affair because the mother is a despot. Her offspring live or die at her will; she controls their nutrient supply, and she can expel or reabsorb them any time. Human pregnancy, on the other hand, is run by committee – and not just any committee, but one whose members often have very different, competing interests and share only partial information. It’s a tug-of-war that not infrequently deteriorates to a tussle and, occasionally, to outright warfare. Many potentially lethal disorders, such as ectopic pregnancy, gestational diabetes, and pre-eclampsia can be traced to mis-steps in this intimate game.
What does all this have to do with menstruation? We’re getting there.
From a female perspective, pregnancy is always a huge investment. Even more so if her species has a hemochorial placenta. Once that placenta is in place, she not only loses full control of her own hormones, she also risks hemorrhage when it comes out. So it makes sense that females want to screen embryos very, very carefully. Going through pregnancy with a weak, inviable or even sub-par fetus isn’t worth it.
That’s where the endometrium comes in. You’ve probably read about how the endometrium is this snuggly, welcoming environment just waiting to enfold the delicate young embryo in its nurturing embrace. In fact, it’s quite the reverse. Researchers, bless their curious little hearts, have tried to implant embryos all over the bodies of mice. The single most difficult place for them to grow was – the endometrium.
Far from offering a nurturing embrace, the endometrium is a lethal testing-ground which only the toughest embryos survive. The longer the female can delay that placenta reaching her bloodstream, the longer she has to decide if she wants to dispose of this embryo without significant cost. The embryo, in contrast, wants to implant its placenta as quickly as possible, both to obtain access to its mother’s rich blood, and to increase her stake in its survival. For this reason, the endometrium got thicker and tougher – and the fetal placenta got correspondingly more aggressive.
But this development posed a further problem: what to do when the embryo died or was stuck half-alive in the uterus? The blood supply to the endometrial surface must be restricted, or the embryo would simply attach the placenta there. But restricting the blood supply makes the tissue weakly responsive to hormonal signals from the mother – and potentially more responsive to signals from nearby embryos, who naturally would like to persuade the endometrium to be more friendly. In addition, this makes it vulnerable to infection, especially when it already contains dead and dying tissues.
The solution, for higher primates, was to slough off the whole superficial endometrium – dying embryos and all – after every ovulation that didn’t result in a healthy pregnancy. It’s not exactly brilliant, but it works, and most importantly, it’s easily achieved by making some alterations to a chemical pathway normally used by the fetus during pregnancy. In other words, it’s just the kind of effect natural selection is renowned for: odd, hackish solutions that work to solve proximate problems. It’s not quite as bad as it seems, because in nature, women would experience periods quite rarely – probably no more than a few tens of times in their lives between lactational amenorrhea and pregnancies***.
We don’t really know how our hyper-aggressive placenta is linked to the other traits that combine to make humanity unique. But these traits did emerge together somehow, and that means in some sense the ancients were perhaps right. When we metaphorically ‘ate the fruit of knowledge’ – when we began our journey toward science and technology that would separate us from innocent animals and also lead to our peculiar sense of sexual morality – perhaps that was the same time the unique suffering of menstruation, pregnancy and childbirth was inflicted on women. All thanks to the evolution of the hemochorial placenta.
Another woman utterly failed by our society’s devaluation of women’s reproductive health.
We can’t wait around for male doctors to decide what we need to know.
This is why we need to take control and educate ourselves about our own bodies.
and here’s some comments i saw under the post. why is this a pattern?? why is this a recurring theme?? why is this information not common knowledge? what the fuck are doctors doing??
This is news to me so let’s share it so people will know!
Gross tmi: but i passed a pretty big clot after having my daughter. It was about the size of a baseball. It actually hurt worse because while 15 hours of labor opened my cervix, i passed the clot in 30 minutes. I knew it was a possibility because of my midwife and reading, but everyone Ive told after this (mostly other pregnant women) were shocked that this could happen.
In our culture, it’s much more common to do deep research about what family cars we want to buy than we do about childbirth when we ’re pregnant.
Tmi: I passed a huge clot after birth in the bathroom of my hospital room and called the nurse sobbing because I didn’t know it was normal. She treated me like an idiot, but NO ONE told me it was a possibility. And the pain associated with healing for the first couple of weeks after birth was worse than the labor imo. Again, I had no idea. They didn’t tell me a thing besides “sitz bath regularly and change your pads.” Before discharging me from the hospital.
I was most definitely told about this in school. Fucking hell, 4-6 weeks of bleeding? My periods were/are bad enough, why the hell don’t we get told this?
I didn’t know it could last so long, wtf? Is the bleeding inevitable after birth?
Bleeding is inevitable after birth - your uterine wall is shedding a fuck ton of lining. It can last from three to six weeks (possible longer) and it tapers off.
More TMI - I passed a MASSIVE clot after my fourth birth. At this point I already knew this could happen - it’s normal. What I DIDN’T know, was that I had caused it.
My post birth contractions were so bad after the birth that it felt like full transition labor. And they don’t give you anything for the pain. So I used a hot water bottle, without the nurses knowing, and it caused me to bleed even more. I lost so much blood that by the first time they sat me up to go to the bathroom, I fainted. It took three more tries until I could sit up.
Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is, the next morning I passed a clot the SIZE OF ANOTHER PLACENTA I KID YOU NOT, and I know what is and is not normal. So I called for the nurse and through the door told her I had passed a huge clot, and her response was - “It’s not big. I know what big is.” She hadn’t even looked. So I rolled my eyes and said, “Yeah, no. It’s big, I’m telling you.”
So, sounding extremely put upon, she asked me to open the door. I did, and after a long pause she goes, “Okay, yeah, that’s a little big.”
YOU DON’T SAY.
The point I’m trying to get across is that this shit is so common - women not knowing this stuff is so expected, and it keeps getting reinforced. People don’t expect you to know anything, don’t teach you anything, and then make you feel like you’re totally ignorant and a burden for your lack of knowledge when THEY WON’T SHARE.
Fucking learn EVERYTHING you can when it comes to childbirth, girls. It is the single most empowering thing you can do for yourself. And if you missed something, that’s okay. But the more knowledge you arm yourself with, the more in control of your situation you’ll be.
A few post partum tips:
DON’T use a hot water bottle - lol.
ONLY pads - NO tampons. Tampons can cause severe infection, not to mention, you probably don’t want to be shoving anything up there any time soon.
If you’ve had stitches, sitz baths DO help relieve the pain. Another great pain reliever? Dampen some pads and freeze them. Let one thaw slightly and use it on top of another pad. This will help with the pain as well as reduce swelling. Change the pad out as soon as it’s thawed completely. This REALLY helps on the first couple days after giving birth.
If you pass a clot, don’t sweat it. Even the one I passed, which was fucking massive, just required that we keep an eye out to make sure it didn’t happen again. If it does, talk to your doctor.
Take a pain killer half an hour before nursing. Because YES - your uterus is contracting after you give birth, to get back to its original size, and nursing causes much stronger contractions. Taking nursing-safe painkillers won’t prevent the pain, but it will reduce it.
Buy disposable underwear for the first few days after birth. They will get VERY dirty. Or use your ratty old pairs that you’re ready to get rid of. Double up on pads - line them all the way up your ass-crack. I am so serious. And wear dark pants.
Pee in the shower. You do NOT want to wipe down there right after birth because ow. Peeing in the shower lets you just rinse afterwards. Especially if you’ve had stitches, peeing in the shower, with the shower-head rinsing AS you go, keeps stinging to a minimum. And fuck everyone else - keep on peeing in the shower until you feel ready to move back to toilet paper. Middle of the night and need to pee? Get your pants off - get in the shower and just go.
This is just a few things, but PLEASE feel free to send me an ask if you have any questions about ANYTHING childbirth/pregnancy/nursing related. I have four incredible kids. I’ve done it all - c-section, vacuume birth, episiotimy, stitches, with an epidural, without an epidural. I’m here.
I learned about cramping while nursing and bleeding after pregnancy, not from a medical textbook, or a doctor or medical professional.
No, I learned about it from reading Clan Of the Cave Bear. A fictional book about Neanderthals had more valuable advice regarding pregnancy thank any other book I have read, at least while I was a kid.
Okay so I didn’t know about this either so I’m interrupting my usual fandom posts to share this because what the fuck I had no idea.
I am well aware of PPD/A. Even since my first pregnancy with Mac, it was been something that is widely discussed, especially online. Nurses and doctors were on the look out for it after I delivered my kids, the midwife who visited my home shortly after each birth asked me questions about my mental state, and even my children’s pediatrician seemed to gently address it.
But I have never heard the term antepartum depression until this article. And how timely is this article, given yesterday’s post.
I remember vividly one day when I was pregnant with Mac, I went out for Vietnamese food with my mom. I confessed to her that I was nervous about PPD/A because I didn’t seem to feel the same way other people did during pregnancy and given my history with depression (I struggled with depression through my teen years and off and on through young adulthood), I felt I was at risk. She gave me advice that quelled my fears and as she predicted, I felt totally fine and happy once that baby was out of me and different hormones surged through me.
Ever since then, I have taken to speaking of my mental state in euphemisms while pregnant, because it is always embarrassing to suffer from mental illness, but particularly so when you’re supposed to be overjoyed with a new life inside you. I’d say I was “moody” or “hormonal” or “out of sorts”. I have always been afraid to confess to even my doctor the way I’m actually feeling during pregnancy. When I finally decided to touch on the subject with her at my last appointment, even then I played it down. But last night, when I took the mild anti-anxiety medicine she prescribed for me, within 30 minutes of taking it I felt as if a weight had been lifted from my chest. I felt able to cope. For years I haven’t been able to identify that I’ve actually been suffering from a form of mental illness and thus haven’t even been able to admit it.
After reading this article, it was like a lightbult went off. It makes complete sense that the same girl who struggled with depression as a hormonal teenager would also struggle with it as a hormonal pregnant woman. But how absurd that it took my until my third pregnancy – six years after my worries during my first pregnancy – to finally realize what I am struggling with.
I urge you all to read this long, but important article. And please, talk about it, because no one should have to spend years feeling ashamed of something over which they have no control and are unable to even identify.
“Let’s see…something with enough calcium and folate, nothing unpasturized, should have omega 3’s, need to be careful about pesticides, probably whole wheat, enough fat but not too much fat, and can’t irritate my acid reflux, nausea, or constipation.
So that means I can eat….nothing.”
I wrote this a year an a half ago, around the time that my husband and I agreed to forever remain a one child family. He’s getting snipped on Friday, and I’m having rather stupid emotional turmoil about it, so I’m reposting this list which was originally posted on my LiveJournal.
A few months ago, Billy and I decided that we were quite happy that James is leaving the infant stage behind, and we aren’t too keen on ever entering it again with another child. However, a friend once told me that when one’s first child reaches the age of two, one starts dreaming of another baby. James is only eighteen months (1 1/2) and my friend might be full of shit, but I decided that in the face of all the adorable babies who have been popping up lately, I would make a list of all the reasons I never want to get pregnant and raise an infant ever again.
In no particular order…
The worst leg cramp ever.
Swollen everything.
Collecting a day’s worth of urine.
Random pains in all parts of my body.
No caffeine or alcohol for nine months.
Constant questions from family, friends, and random strangers.
Crying, so much crying (before the baby was born!)
Crying, so much crying (after the baby is born!)
Crazy hormones in general, is what I’m getting at here.
Labor pains!
Horrid post-natal rash!
Bleeding for months straight!
Stressing over breast feeding.
Never sleeping.
Acute loneliness.
Baby crying for an hour before bedtime every single night.
Baby crying whenever he is put down
Constantly carrying baby.
Stressing over spoon-feeding.
Stressing over reaching all the milestones.
Stressing over baby being too small or too big or too slow or too everything.
Lots of stress.
Riding in the back of the car b/c baby will cry the whole time otherwise.
Fussing with bottles and baby formula.
No more babies means more money to spend on James
Greater ability to give James what he needs (and wants)
Not having to wait until another child is old enough to enjoy the park, the zoo, museums, Disneyland ***
This is not an exhaustive list by any means, but you get the picture. And I shall be reminded of the picture whenever I read this list.
(feel free to reblog this and add your own reasons to not have a(nother) baby)
Pre-eclampsia!
Postpartum Depression!
Having to buy all new baby things again, because we’ve given them all away.
Having, at the least, an almost four year age gap between children, which can be quite a stretch.
