Women’s Wisdom, Women’s Words

By Milli Hill, author of The Positive Birth Book, Give Birth like a Feminist, and My Period (for preteen girls). This article is adapted from Milli’s talk at the Feminism for Birth and Maternal Health and Motherhood session at #FiLiA2021

Some of you may know me from my books, others of you may know me because earlier this year, I told the story of how I was ‘cancelled’ for advocating for sex-based language in maternity.

My talk will spin through some of the issues around birth, women’s reproductive biology, the narrative and words around women’s bodies, that I have observed in the past decade of talking and writing about pregnancy, birth and most recently, periods. The thread that (hopefully!) runs through will be woman’s knowledge and wisdom of their body, and the power of words.

It starts with the egg!

How do we present facts and information? Every drawing in every biology book, however seemingly dry and boring, will tell you a story about the people at that time and how they understood women and their bodies! I knew there would be diagrams in My Period, and I knew I didn’t want them all to be ‘disembodied’. We often see pregnant women depicted by faceless photos of ‘just a bump’ and this has the potential to reduce a woman down to a body part, and detract from her as a whole person. So I did not want lots of disembodied uterus’s and vulva’s in My Period for the same reason. We are whole people not body parts.

So one day my then 10 year old daughter came down to find me at the kitchen table drawing the picture on the left. She was curious as to why so I explained about the book and the way I wanted to show that a uterus was part of a girl, not a weird floating object! She got out a pencil and did her own version, and we were so thrilled when the illustrator went with her idea and it made it into the book! My daughter could quickly see how humanising the illustration was important, I only gave a quick explanation and it was obvious to her.

And eggs! I discovered another interesting narrative when writing about ovulation in the book. Who here has heard the story that the sperm all have a race to get to the egg, and the best and strongest one is the WINNER?! But did you know that eggs are also ‘competitive’?

Your ovaries contain little sacs called follicles where there are always eggs in different stages of development. Each month, some of these eggs start to get bigger and stronger, ready to be released. The ‘winning’ egg is usually the biggest and strongest, and is released to travel down the fallopian tube. You could see this as a competition to see which egg will be the chosen one, just like the racing sperm. But we are not often told this story in fact has anyone ever heard it?!

Even in this description of the biological event of conception, there are familiar themes. The egg, mysterious, and passive, waiting for something dynamic to happen to her. The sperm, heroic, strong, competitive and active, saves the day! Etc. A tale as old as time.

The seeds we plant

It’s very interesting to explore the stories we are told about our female bodies, and think about how this impacts us. As well as stories that give us subtle messages about our role in life, like the one of the passive egg, there are many others that depict women’s bodies as defective in some way, or not fit for purpose.

I wrote a chapter about this in Give Birth like a Feminist, and my favourite example from it is that of the ‘obstetric dilemma’. Has anyone heard this story? That female childbirth is difficult if not impossible because we have evolved to walk on two legs? Yup? What does it imply? That women’s bodies are not really quite right, are they?!

So the obstetric dilemma theory is that we have had to reach an evolutionary compromise in the pelvis, basically meaning it is just wide enough for birth but not so wide we cannot stand up. What a dilemma, especially if you’re in obstetrics, right?!

Everyone accepts the OD as fact, basically, but it is only a theory, put forward in 1960, and it has since been debunked by Holly Dunsworth, a Rhode Island anthropology professor. In 2007, she became curious about how a theory that suggested women were biologically ‘compromised’ in some way could be so widely accepted. In 2012, she proposed a new theory, EGG, which focuses on one of the many unanswered questions about women’s bodies, why does labour begin? I won’t go into Holly’s theory here, you can read about it in my book or in her work online. But I do want to share her words about it:

This session from the #FiLiA2021 explores how the patriarchy operates in birth, maternity and motherhood, specifically considering the choices available to women and how these are constrained as a means of control, at worst leading to obstetric violence.

“If one were so inclined, one might even say that women’s hips are more adapted than men’s, given selection did not just build them as keystones of bipedalism but also as gateways for the ever-evolving species. Nevertheless the obstetric dilemma is subsumed into the medical tradition and it is helping to overestimate risk and to underestimate women’s bodies. Women are not “compromised” and our bodies do not pose dilemmas to be solved. We are just as adapted as men, and all the proof you need is that we birthed all of them.’

If we accept the OD as fact, though, we come to birth, even before labour starts, with low expectations of a woman’s capabilities. This is me in the pic, by the way, just after I birthed my second baby, at home, no drugs, no tearing, no stitches. She was ten pounds four!

The broken thread of wisdom

My inspiration for moving into periods, so to speak, came from a workshop I attended with Australian Jane Hardwicke Collings who runs the School of Shamanic Womancraft out there. On a workshop with her, she asked me to consider questions such as: how were you born? How was your mother born? What were your mother’s experiences of pregnancy and birth? How was she told about menstruation or birth by her mother? How were you told about periods? How was your first period, what happened? How did you feel when you were first pregnant etc? I highly recommend spending some time thinking about these questions, about the stories you and your mother and her mother were told about their bodies, and notice any threads of interconnectedness. Some people call the maternal line in a family, the red thread.

Many of today’s women don’t have any positive narrative about periods, birth or breastfeeding, and many women struggle with some or all of these aspects of being female. We need to revive the tradition of women passing on wisdom, somehow.

There are also serious gaps in our basic knowledge about our bodies. David Lammy doesn’t know what a cervix is or whether or not you can grow one or have one implanted or as he put it ‘all the rest of it’, but many women don’t know what a cervix is either – around 50%. In researching My Period, I found more and more gaps, for example, what on earth IS cervical fluid?! Nobody seems to really know much about it!

Reclaiming the power of female biology

In the past 10 to 15 years, social media, for all its ills, has offered an opportunity for women to share and explore the biological experience of being female, uncensored. Well, not uncensored actually!

Women have shown lactation, pubic hair, period blood, crowning babies, the elation of positive birth, fat, cellulite, and more.

All of them have been censored.

The push back

As an advocate for positive birth and for women knowing what is possible, I have had my own experiences of censorship, this came to a peak circa 2014, when I was banned twice from Facebook.

One of the bans was on the day that Kim Kardashian’s bum was ‘breaking the internet’. By coincidence I had shared a picture of a ‘birthing bottom’ that day and got banned for it. The opportunity to ask, ‘why are some bottoms acceptable but others, not so much?’ was too tempting! This resulted in a conversation happening around the world about the power of birth and why we might want to censor such images.

The language of push back

Until recently, we have been fighting other language battles in birth!

These are all attempts to hold the power in a very imbalanced power dynamic.

Women push back against the system and are told, “You don’t need a birth plan!” (in other words, don’t worry your pretty little head about it, etc), or they are told, “A healthy baby is all that matters”, (i.e don’t be selfish and focus on yourself, don’t be a ‘birthzilla’! The baby is the important person in this situation.)

Floaty dressed women

You don’t have to look far for evidence of deeply embedded misogyny eg Adam Kay’s book This is going to hurt, in which he talks about ‘a certain type of floaty dressed mother’ and his own certainty that such a woman, who has put thought and effort into the birth she wants, will end up in surgery. There is an implication that this is pleasing to him, it’s horrible to read, and yet – it’s a bestseller.

 This attitude was reflected in these now-deleted tweets from obstetricians on Twitter.

This attitude is common. Mocking women, trying to keep them from their power, gatekeeping knowledge of women’s bodies etc. WE KNOW BEST!! In the birth room, doctors have been heard to say things like, “I am the expert here”, or,  “I have delivered hundreds of babies, you have not delivered any” etc.

New taboos

AND THEN, with ALL of this still a million miles from resolved, we have a new taboo.

We recently saw the front page of the Lancet, in which women were called ‘bodies with vaginas’.

Lancet can’t see the irony of this statement!

It doesn’t happen to men

Push back from BPAS

Recently the charity BPAS made this statement which beautifully summarised why it is important to keep the word woman central. This was why I did not say ‘birthing people’ in Give Birth like a Feminist. How can you address sexism and misogyny in the birth room or anywhere else without naming the oppressed people: women?

Statement from BPAS

Remember - I was ‘cancelled’ for saying what BPAS said. I objected to a social media post that said, ‘birthing people are the fragile sex’. It’s not people who have been seen as ‘the fragile sex’ and oppressed on that basis! It’s WOMEN!

I said, “It is women who are seen as the ‘fragile sex’ etc, and obstetric violence is violence against women. Let’s not forget who the oppressed are here, and why.”

And as most of you know, all hell broke loose! And of course I am by no means the only woman to be attacked and have people try to destroy their career for stating biological reality, and for naming the oppressed.

So just as we were getting to the point when we were beginning to discuss our biological experiences, share them with other women, weave together some of those broken threads of wisdom, call it a VULVA and learn what it is…suddenly our words are being censored and made taboo again.

In Give Birth like a Feminist I ask if it’s a coincidence that when women have a truly empowering birth experience, (where they tune into the power of their bodies, where others in the room step back and allow them space, where they birth their baby in their own way, in their own time, on their own terms)…is it a coincidence that those women who have this experience find it transformative AND it is almost impossible for women to access this experience? Are we holding women back from experiencing this power?

Now I ask, is it a coincidence that our words are being censored at this specific point in time? A time when we were starting to reclaim birth, reclaim female biology, talk uncensored. Now it is has become a situation in which we have to think before we speak again. Choose our words carefully. Think about others not just ourselves. Think about the impact of our words. Be kind. Respect the new cultural taboos. Censor ourselves.

No, I don’t think it is a coincidence. Thanks for listening.

BlogJ SteinReproductive Rights