Why the left must reclaim birth
Expert worship, "believe science," and the word "natural"
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The first time I received an email yelling at me for “taking women back to the stone age” was 2019, when I wrote an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times entitled, “Why don’t we take writing about motherhood seriously? Because women do it.”
The op-ed was my first piece to go viral, with upwards of 7,000 shares on Facebook and Twitter. The reception was mostly positive. But the criticism stuck with me, because it represented a persistent, highly educated, liberal feminist view: to champion anything domestic – involving birth, breastfeeding, homemaking, the care of children, or heaven forbid, the adjective “natural” – was to thrust women into a Betty Draper-ish nightmare of oppressed servitude.
For a while, it seemed like we might be entering a so-called “golden age” of writing about motherhood, even if much of that writing still tended to be extremely cautious about depicting the enterprise as, say, enriching. (As someone who has written two books about motherhood, I know very intimately the paranoia about potentially coming off as sentimental and unserious, the immense pressure to err on the side of criticism as evidence of intellect.)
But then our politics started to heat up again, and trad wives became a thing, and I saw many on the left double down on contempt for motherhood: not as an act, per se – totally fine for women to have kids and then get back to being productive and valuable citizens – but as an identity and a life a woman might choose. As anything to be venerated as purposeful and beautiful. I saw tweets like this one, from a woman who “covers gender and politics” for numerous mainstream publications:
“Too good for them” – too good for “embodiment,” too good for “reproduction” (so pathetic!), too good for caregiving. What does “good” equal here? Smart? Successful?
I suppose what is “good” is the kind of white-collar production and productivity, power, “freedom,” and disembodied academic domination traditionally exercised by white men and favored by our traditionally white male capitalist economy? Very feminist!
This is not a radical view. This is mainstream, the default: question it and in a matter of seconds you’ll be accused of taking women back to the stone age.
But the right, the right! the left responds. And yes, the right provides oodles of lip service to the beauty of traditional wifehood and motherhood; loves itself a thin, young, smiling blonde mother with a perfect chubby-cheeked babe on her hip; but has zero incentive to actually care for mothers and children with policies like paid family leave, high quality and affordable childcare, mandated flexible hours and policies for working – and especially breastfeeding – mothers, services for children with disabilities, and excellent public education.
The left, meanwhile, ostensibly fights for these policies – though I haven’t heard much about them in recent election cycles – but has no problem scoffing at women who celebrate motherhood as a primary focus, and arguing that women who opt for “natural” births or prioritize breastfeeding or want to stay home with their babies “shouldn’t get any awards,” “don’t get a trophy,” etc, and may in fact threaten, shame, and oppress other women who don’t want these things, can’t have them, or were denied them.
Somehow, the blame always seems to fall on the mother, and particularly the mother who opts out of the system and therefore “shames” other mothers, and not on, say, the the medical system, the education system, or the corrupt and unregulated industries (tech, pharma) that run them. “Shaming” other women is seen as a greater sin than, say, forcing medically unnecessary C-sections on them, bullying them into traumatic births, failing to provide adequate childcare or education for their children, or gaslighting them about safety and risk.
These systems aren’t often interrogated, but you can bet the term “natural” will come in for a beating. In the inaugural New York Times Parenting column, Jessica Grose argued “there is no universally accepted medical definition of the term ‘natural birth.’” For her, this is simple – the end all be all. No medical definition, thus no reason to use or consider it. Everything must be verified through the medical system, through a medical expert. If they don’t recognize it, it doesn’t exist.
Grose pivots, predictably, to “Dr. Julie Chor, an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Chicago” to confirm for her readers that natural birth is actually not a thing. Sorry, ladies, maybe Instagram misled you into believing this, but here we have a quote from the academic-medical powers that be to show you that you were wrong. The body knows nothing, means nothing. Nothing is natural. Nothing is real. Nothing is true. Nothing is essential. Our sophisticated “scientific” modern society has done away with such concepts, pure fantasies.
Similarly, in a New York Times op-ed entitled “Mothers Are Told That Natural Childbirth Is Best. It Isn’t,” Michelle Goldberg excoriates the natural childbirth movement for its traditionalist roots, which are predictably gender conformist: Dr. Sears believed women should submit to their husbands, La Leche League frowned on mothers who worked outside the home, etc. But instead of considering that perhaps these movements might contain truths as well as outmoded ideologies – after all, it takes only a split-second glance at the history of obstetrics to find medical tomes declaring that women’s uteruses cannot function if women are simultaneously using their brains to read, or that women must be strapped to tables to prevent all movement during birth – Goldberg scoffs at the ridiculous notion of “wisdom” in women’s bodies and declares it all anti-science.
Goldberg does the requisite quoting-of-a-medical-expert essential for any mainstream media story on women’s health, in order to show her readers that what she is saying is true and legitimate. The expert she quotes is a rabid anti-home-birther who hasn’t had a medical license since 2003, has never published in a peer-reviewed journal, and has been banned from many websites and online communities for harassing and insulting both women who’ve had home births and researchers who’ve published studies showing the low risk of home birth. Somehow, Goldberg doesn’t recognize this as shaming. It’s simply taken to be truth.
It’s “science.” Science trusts the OB-GYNs. Science always goes to the experts to find out what is “natural,” real, and true, what is “misinformation” and what is not. Science accepts every intervention without question, with deference. Science dutifully submits to the pediatrician for every well-check, to be told whether or not the baby is OK. Science understands that if no major randomized controlled trials exist to prove that kissing your child is good for them, then there is no need to do so, or to shame other women for not doing it!! If no trials exist, is there any point in even talking about it?! Does it even exist?
It is ironic that the left, so supposedly intent on lifting up women, so loudly shames them for questioning the “experts” who command and scold them through pregnancy, birthing, and postpartum. The left elevates experts like the aforementioned former OB, who publishes screeds on her website with titles like “Yes, it is your fault that your baby died at homebirth,” and Jennifer Gunter, who derides anti-abortion activists by referring to the fetus as a “zombie” or a “pack of cells,” and who treat any women who disagree with them like laughable, brainwashed children.
In an election post-mortem on November 7th, New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino wrote, “In the imaginary world ruled by angry lesbian socialist girlbosses, there is absolutely nothing to stop you from being a barefoot, pregnant homemaker at twenty-four if you’d like to be one. In the increasingly non-hypothetical world ruled by far-right Trumpists, the blissful servitude of women must be insured by removing their control over their bodies, and ideally, actually, by removing them from the public sphere altogether.”
Tolentino argues here that the threat to women from the left is solely imagined and hypothetical, a ridiculous construction, but that from the right is frighteningly real. I agree with the latter, but not the former. Tolentino’s language alone betrays the fallacy here: “barefoot, pregnant homemaker” is hardly a neutral description of a woman who opts into full-time motherhood. It’s charged with a heavy dose of coastal elitism and an ironic sexism and contempt for a decision Tolentino clearly sees as silly. But go ahead, you’re free to make this choice, women! Go on, go ahead and get barefoot and waste your life wiping butts and squeezing milk from your boobs.
In her preoccupation with the right and its overt misogyny, Tolentino seems to assume that the left is a paradise of “choice” for women, when in fact the left fetishizes a certain set of choices – capitalist white-collar work, creative and intellectual production – and denigrates others, while, like the right, offering scant support for either. If you want to celebrate abortion or divorce, the left is happy to thrust you on a podium and cheer your modernity, but if you want to talk about motherhood, you’re basically spouting Trumpist propaganda. Stop sending women back to the stone age.
I have had the following argument with numerous liberal women, whom I align with in many ways and who truly want to support mothers. It begins with this refrain: “But they have this incredibly dangerous ideology/but they want to take away our rights/but they want to repress women…” All of these things are true. I agree.
But when I say the left also has an ideology, one that is in many ways alienated from the body and the needs and desires of many women; one that minimizes motherhood as an experience of significance and sees it as hostile to intellectual, cultural, and academic work; one that portrays hesitancy and skepticism of the medical system as silly granola “wellness” and worships the opinions of experts – they are dismayed. The left is just…reality. It’s just…the goodness we’re all striving towards. The only way. It’s the Believe Science bumper sticker.
Many on the left have alternately mocked and fretted about the “wellness-to-far-right pipeline,” a very real phenomenon in which (mostly white) women start out seeking, say, natural remedies for a child’s cough, and wind up voting for someone who brags about grabbing pussies and eliminating their reproductive rights. As in the case with immigrants who vote for Trump, the left does not express much curiosity for why and how this process occurs.
When Jessica Grose purportedly sets out to investigate the women who support RFK’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement, she interviews not the mothers themselves but…a doctor. She spends no fewer than six paragraphs sharing this expert’s opinions on how to “combat” this movement, but does not once speak to a mother who supports it about her values and experiences.
Grose simply assumes that it’s the responsibility of “pro-vaccine,” “pro-science” leftists to set straight these poor, misguided ladies “with wide-brimmed hats and beachy waves” (urban coastal liberal speak for cringey Midwesterners!) who don’t understand “science.”
Grose knows so little about this movement and the people behind it, many of whom switched from being far-left progressives to ardent Trumpers, that she has no idea that “combatting” them via the advice of doctors and “pro-science” viewpoints is an excellent way to get them to double down on their abhorrence for contemporary liberalism.
She is so entrenched in ideology that she can only see these people she “covers” as akin to religious primitives, whose misguidedness the experts will have to find a way to train out of them. More education! More “critical thinking!” More facts! Such are the arguments of a liberal worldview so incurious and certain of itself that it assumes that all it has to do is kindly and gently “educate” the suspicious, who will then come to recognize the fundamental truth and reality of white liberalism. There is no natural, okay, sweetie? Just do what the doctor tells you.
This election, 53% of white women, 38% of Latino women, and 46% of women of “all other races” voted for Trump. Only black women came out in force for the Democrats. One could simply say this all amounts to racism and internalized misogyny. Certainly there is plenty of that among white women, and I see and feel it whenever I take my Latina daughter into heavy Trump country. I feel little affinity for these voters and a great deal of nausea at what they’ve brought to bear. But – I don’t think more contempt for the “barefoot and pregnant,” for “wellness,” even for anti-vaxxers, is doing anything at all to change this trend. In fact, it’s reinforcing it.
We have a birthing system that is dysfunctional, abusive, broken, and leaving women with sky-high rates of trauma and postpartum illness, which this same system then tries to medicate away. We have the so-called “developed” world’s worst and most expensive childcare and public education, and we offer mothers almost zero functional and financial support. We have a medical system utterly corrupted by massive profit-seeking healthcare conglomerates, private equity, the twisted machinations of insurance, and yes, big pharma (which anyone who has read for four seconds about the opioid epidemic would be very wise to suspect!) But: Believe Science.
The left has ceded discussion of motherhood to trad wives it depicts both as thinly veiled white nationalists and clueless little girls, while openly celebrating rhetoric that denigrates women who give up their careers as “wasting their lives”; the right, meanwhile, has gladly embraced the opportunity to elevate motherhood while simultaneously doubling down on sexist tropes, restricting women’s rights, and offering absolutely nothing of policy or practical support.
The left has focused fetishistically on abortion to the point where it has alienated many women of color; many Latinas, in particular, are staunchly pro-life. Obviously, the left should not abandon this urgent fight. But the white liberals buying Jessica Valenti’s “Abortion Everyday” sweatshirts decorated with hearts and stars, or wearing gold-plated Abortion necklaces, may not realize how offensive and alienating such rhetoric can be.
I strongly support a woman’s right to choose, while also recognizing that abortion is a morally complex decision, and often a source of profound ambivalence, trauma, and grief. If the left wants to build a stronger coalition in this arena, decorative tote bags celebrating the act of ending a pregnancy with fun bubble fonts probably aren’t the way. But the contemporary liberal attitude is often: this is such a given and essential truth, a basic moral good, that anyone who disagrees simply cannot be tolerated.
In the same piece in which Tolentino applauds the left’s tolerance of the barefoot and pregnant, she points out that 86 percent of Democratic parents and 88 percent of Republican parents think of parenting as the most important aspect of their identity. It seems a poor strategy on the left, then, to treat women who centralize their motherhood as pathetic retrograde sellouts, and to dismiss the many women who are deeply disenchanted with how medical, political, and cultural systems have treated them as mothers as brainwashed “wellness-to-far-right” automatons. What if, instead, we started with listening to their concerns?
As Naomi Klein points out in Doppelganger, one of the biggest dangers of living in our information siloes is that we outright reject anything that the “other side” has elevated as relevant. We end up in a zero-sum game, becoming more dogmatic and ideological and less “scientific.”
Science, like culture, is an ever-shifting set of beliefs, some of which are confirmed, some of which are rejected, many of which can be false and harmful. In the panic to dismiss any threat of “wellness” or “woo,” the left has made science its religion.
I think of Hillary Frank, host of the popular podcast “The Longest Shortest Time,” who had a traumatic birth that left her with lingering pain. She had wanted an unmedicated birth, but, in the hospital, found herself forced into a classic series of escalating interventions – first the Pitocin because of “failure to progress,” then accelerated contractions that stressed the baby, then an epidural, and finally a brutal and botched episiotomy. Frank did not blame the medical system for any of this. Instead, she invited the famous midwife Ina May Gaskin onto her podcast to castigate Gaskin for promoting natural birth.
These kinds of surreal contortions are evidence of an ideology that cannot hold, but on which many are doubling down anyway.
If the feminist left wants to build a strong coalition to combat Trumpism, it’s going to have to contend with motherhood, and it’s going to have to finally reckon with the paradox that many women seek and cherish identities and lives that the patriarchy has traditionally tried to celebrate for its own ends.
It’s going to have to stop ceding those lives and identities to the right, to stop rejecting anything that carries the taint of traditional femininity and instead employ it to more radical ends: community building, policy making, fierce advocacy for children and families, new models of education and children’s rights and collective life, deeper connections to food systems and land and animals and the natural world.
It’s going to have to question the painfully ironic invocation to “Believe science,” and stop pivoting to experts at every turn to explain to women what’s best for them. It’s going to have to start featuring voices beyond the coastal media elites, whom, yes, in spite of the cringy-ness of such buzzwords, are a very real phenomenon. Even with increased diversity, a sameness of education, ideology, and values often persists.
As a writer and an American, I feel lost. I abhor the policies of the right: the unabashed, proud racism that directly threatens my family; the profound ignorance of American history and foreign policy and the impacts of both on the rest of the world; and above all, the insouciant lack of concern for the environment that has devastated Pennsylvania in particular and threatens the health of children every day. The incoming government would destroy our planet to enrich its nascent oligarchy. It’s real. It’s terrible.
But I am sick of then feeling like I must tow the line with the left. To vote for someone I dislike, whose rhetoric and policies I disagree with, because “a vote is not a valentine.” To write about something other than birth and motherhood because there is such a profound antipathy to these topics in publishing. To not speak out for fear of empowering “them.” To agree to write for mainstream publications by always privileging the perspectives and approval of experts. To never frame the ideology as ideology.
This is destructive. This is unhelpful. This is corrosive to dreaming, building, creativity.
Motherhood, for me, has been a profoundly difficult experience and a profoundly creative one. If anything, it has shown me that I can take nothing for granted. That we are all in a wild process of becoming, all the time. Capable of so much more than we might imagine. Wide open and curious if we allow ourselves to be. Attuned to the natural world when given the opportunity, in need of very fundamental things: love, care, trust, belief.
I attended a loving-kindness meditation the other night and the teacher told us a story about being at a massive event with the Dalai Lama. 75,000 people in a stadium in Los Angeles, meditating together. Towards the end the Dalai Lama asked, “Do you believe liberation is possible?”
If you don’t believe it’s possible, it won’t happen. And part of that belief is moving past dogma, moving past ideology, to be able to conceive of something completely different. Are we willing to do that?
Mothers are capable of insane feats. They are certainly capable of remaking this broken society, of building pathways out of this conformity and stuck-ness, this hate. They can do it barefoot and pregnant just as much as they can do it in the glass-walled offices of New York City. The left can be this, embrace this, too. This is my wish as we move into the darkest days of the year: that we find a profound expansion in the way birth breaks us.
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Yes, yes, yes. Though I'm not a mother, I feel this in my world of health. As somebody who is in between the two worlds - glad for vaccines, but terrified of big pharma's influence; an herbalist who is also thankful for modern medicine; an energy worker who knows at the core of so many of diseases are trapped trauma and emotions dysregulating the nervous system - and who ultimately believes so much of our illnesses are caused by a separation from nature - AND as somebody who has been a lifelong democrat/progressive who voted for Harris - the left's blindness to their own ideology around these topics is frightening. Trump is a fascist, RFK is a grifter, but Believe Science has become its own strident, unquestionable dogma - not to mention it ignores the deep influence of the patriarchy and white supremacy in our own modern medical system, that we never seem to question. Thanks for putting such eloquence to this topic. There are a lot of us out here - progressive women, who are looking around at the illness spreading amongst us all, the depression and anxiety amongst children, the death grip capitalism has on is that starts from such an early age, and are saying, "What we're doing isn't working." And so we must continue to speak up as you do so beautifully and keep forging our own path. Thank you for writing this and all of your work that digs into these themes. Keep going!
The disdain for and devaluing of motherhood—and the biological processes connected to it—on the left is so pervasive in big and small ways. Tbh, it’s now difficult for me to read anything from a mainstream feminist or female writer on their own experiences of pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding, etc—because of the willful lack of reflection on the system’s impacts on their personal experiences (and that of others!!!) and tendency to write off trauma and lack of support as part and parcel of motherhood. And also the lack of any understanding or valuing of these experiences as profound and transformative rites of passage, in part because they *are* embodied and biological.
As a doula, I couldn’t even bring myself to read the anti-“natural” birth screed in the NYT earlier this year—like why trigger myself and make myself angry at such a nearsighted perspective? In lots of ways, it felt like mainstream feminism and the media discourse on parenting WAS moving, for a few years, at least, towards being more expansive in terms of birth, lactation, and parenthood. I saw it often in publications, orgs, etc—and as a writer and doula, I’m paying close attention to how these things are covered in the media. But I think Dobbs and the rise of Trumpism/tradwife stuff is pushing the rhetoric back to ABORTION ONLY PLEASE and it’s profoundly not the message that the country needs to hear. It’s not the one I want to align myself with, either, even as a proudly pro-choice birthworker.
I have felt like I’m losing my political home because it doesn’t feel like Democrats and the left care about anything I care about anymore, except for the right to have an abortion. I am watching with horror as those in the crunchy/wellness world turn right, but I’m also not willing to budge on those principles I hold in common with them. All of it is unmooring.
I am super grateful for your work and perspective and feel this is such an important conversation to have right now. There has to be a huge shift in the culture and in the cultural conversation.