I don’t understand why but people were so terrible to me during pregnancy. I had nausea so bad I that I couldn’t stand up for more than a minute or two and was working from home laying on my couch thankfully having easy work because most of the activity had been in-person events prior. I would waddle to the stove to boil a potato and then curl into the floor until it was soft and then waddle back to the couch and eat it with a fork straight out of the water just plain and that was seriously using all of my will power. It was absolutely brutal and felt like I’d been removed from this world or something. Thankfully it only lasted the first trimester and I felt absolutely no nausea anymore by that 10-14 week mark. Still, people’s attitudes were sorta like “yeah women are pregnant all the time pull yourself together” and I had to just shut off wanting any comfort from anyone to mentally survive. That state plus worrying if your baby is okay with no support is a terrible initiation into the dark side of motherhood. I don’t know what to do about it other than to have women who have been there willing to reach out and comfort the mother, suggest whatever things helped her, and assure her the nausea WILL end.

To me it’s another symptom tied into how culturally we just don’t care about supporting mothers and feel like “got yourself pregnant now figure it out that’s life” or something like that, as if having a child isn’t one of the most important things in life that people should culturally and socially aspire to nurture as much as possible.

No one recognized just how sick her daughter was, Susan says, sharing that Jess was given an anti-nausea medication — but then advised not to take it because it could harm her baby.

If they had prioritized the woman over the pregnancy, she would be alive, and in all likelihood, the baby would be, too.

(I mean, many medications they don't even know if they're harmful to pregnancies, they just slap the warning on there just in case. It is rather proof of society's misogyny that there's no pregnancy-approved anti-nausea medications that are strong enough - granted, I don't know if scopolamine, the strongest anti-nausea medication I know of, would harm the fetus, but I don't know that it has any abortive effects, and in most cases, the dosage of any herb that'd end a pregnancy would kill a woman, too, which is why DIY abortions are so dangerous. In any case, modern science would have found something safe if they'd looked hard enough, I am sure.)

This is painful to even think about. I've been one of those women sitting in a hospital with a drip. My morning sickness was never bad enough to need hospitalization, but I did visit the emergency room a few times over the course of my pregnancies.

My neighbor spent days in the hospital going back again and again a few years after me. I don't know how she made it through her one and only pregnancy.