Ilya Mechnikov, a scientist arguably quite ahead of his time, shared a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1908 for his work on human immunity. His research interest was garnered by his (not arguable) horrid experiences with diseases caused by bacterial infection. After his first wife died from tuberculosis, he attempted to take his own life with an opium overdose, but managed to live. His misery didn’t end there however. When his second wife developed typhoid fever, he wanted to die with her, and inoculated himself with a tick-borne disease. They both survived, but it made him realize the salient significance of the body’s natural immune system.

In the wake of their bodies’ perseverance, Mechnikov grew dedicated—obsessed—with research in human immunity. During the cholera epidemic in France in 1892, as part of his self-experimentation, he drank a culture of Vibrio cholera, the bacteria responsible for the disease.

He didn’t get sick, so he gave the culture to a volunteer in his lab—who didn’t contract cholera either—but a second volunteer became stricken with the disease and subsequently died. In further lab experiments, he found that some microbes stimulated the growth of cholera bacteria and some hindered it.

He thought the human gut flora was responsible for this and hypothesized that if ingesting a pathogenic culture can make you sick, then surely a good one should promote health. “With the help of science man can correct the imperfections of his nature,” he wrote.

The use of fermented foods—which in essence and most cases are cultures of “good bacteria”—has been around for centuries. Research shows written records of the health benefits of fermented milk (yogurt) and fermented milk products date as far as back as 6000 BC in ancient Hindu scripts. The Greeks made written reference to fermented food products in 100 BC, and it is reputed that Genghis Khan fed his army fermented mare’s milk because he believed it instilled bravery in them. It was not until the 20th century, though, that a Bulgarian medical student—Stamen Grigorov—discovered a lactic acid bacteria (Bacillus bulgaricus) in yogurt cultures.

Bacterial fermented foods, thought to promote digestive health, are prevalent throughout history and ubiquitous in every corner of the globe, from Eastern European sauerkraut to Korean kimchi to Japanese natto.

In current times, a growing body of research shows that maintaining a healthy gut and microbiome with diet can have a significant impact on health and well being. Further, it is contended that the right balance of gut bacteria can help stave off disease.

The Second Brain In Our Gut

A microbiologist once told me, “You are over 90% bacteria and about 10% human.” What? Really? I then looked it up and found out it was indeed true. We have 10 times more bacterial cells cohabiting our bodies than human cells. The human microbiome is collectively the 10-100 trillion microorganisms, mainly bacteria, living in our gut weighing between one to three pounds; every microbiome is specific to a particular environment (all microorganisms interacting with each other in a particular area in the body, such as the gastrointestinal tract or gut) or body part.

The microbiome also refers to the combined genetic material of the microbiota in that environment or organ. These trillions of bacteria interact and communicate with the enteric nervous system or what scientists have labeled the “second brain.”

As Michael Gershon, Professor of Pathology and Cell Biology at Columbia University and “father of neurogastroenterology” writes, “Once dismissed as a simple collection of relay ganglia (a cluster of nerve cell bodies), the enteric nervous system is now recognized as a complex, integrative brain in its own right.”

The enteric nervous system comprises about 500 million neurons or two-thirds the amount found in a cat. It is embedded in our gastrointestinal tract—starting at the esophagus and ending at the anus.

Together, the second brain in the gut and its microbiome have a significant effect on the brain, influencing mood, behavior, and disease. As such, the National Institute of Health (NIH) in the U.S. launched the Human Microbiome Project in order to identify and characterize the human microbiota.

The Great Brain-Gut-Microbiome Connection

Recent evidence shows that the brain interacts with the enteric system in the gut (second brain) and the gut microbiome in a bi-directional manner. It’s a three-way communication circuit called the Brain-Gut-Microbiome Axis and involves three systems—central nervous, gastrointestinal, and immune. A common example of a brain-gut interaction is that “butterflies in your stomach” feeling. Your palms are sweaty and trembling, your heart rate increases, your skin becomes pale or flushed, and you (maybe) feel like you want to throw up. This is part of the fight-or-flight physiological stress response and evidence of how our gut is related to how we feel.

So just how do the microbes in our gut influence mood? In truth, scientists are not 100% clear on how these microbes directly influence our brains, but they propose that it’s through multiple pathways. For example, it is well known that the four main chemicals associated with happiness and mood in human beings are dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins. Research shows serotonin (although its function is complex as it is involved in many physiological processes) to be a mood regulator playing a major role in the treatment of depression and susceptibility to both depression and suicide.

The enteric nervous system in our gastrointestinal tract is now recognized as a complex, integrative brain in its own right.
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And guess what? About 90% of the body’s serotonin is made in the digestive tract; researchers at Caltech showed that gut microbes are integral in serotonin synthesis. Similarly, gut bacteria are implicated in the synthesis of other chemicals and neurotransmitters involved in mood regulation and disease. Further, scientific findings in the journal Behavioural Brain Works illustrated that some bacteria affect how these mood compounds are metabolized. Perhaps the most fascinating finding, however, is that some microbes can activate the vagus nerve, the longest cranial nerve in the body and a main line of bidirectional communication between the brain and gut.

90% of the body’s serotonin is made in the digestive tract.
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Advancements in genome sequencing technology is enabling research into the impact of the gut microbiome on disease. By mapping the genome of the gut microbiome in diseased vs. healthy humans and animals, conclusions on the role of the gut microbes in disease proliferation can—and have been—deduced. And a very interesting way to glean this information is to analyze feces.

Your poop can be very informative. One study using genetic analysis of clinically depressive folks’ poop compared to those who aren’t, found several correlations between the human fecal microbiota (representative of gut microbiota) and depression. Although they report that their findings need to be further tested in larger cohorts, their results were specific for a particular strain (sub-type of microorganism) and genus (group or class of species):

 “The Oscillibacter type strain has valeric acid as its main metabolic end product, a homolog of neurotransmitter GABA (γ-aminobutyric acid), while Alistipes has previously been shown to associated with induced stress in mice.”

“Valeric acid structurally resembles GABA, and has been shown to bind the GABAa receptor. Therefore, it is possible that bacteria involved in valeric acid production and/or metabolism could also be associated with depression.”

The work of professor Bernhard Lüscher and colleagues at Penn State University shows that enhancing the activity of GABA in the brains of depressed mice has antidepressive effects, similar to that of antidepressive drugs, bringing mice back to “normal” behavior. Noteworthy is that GABA is implicated in mood disorders and its agonists have been shown to be antidepressive and antimanic.

This includes less of a certain type of bacteria in human fecal microbiota in depressed individuals compared to healthy ones.

Your poop can be *very* informative. Studies have found several correlations between the human fecal microbiota and depression.
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What is even more interesting is that researchers at the University College Cork in Ireland showed that if you transplant the microbiome from a depressed individual to animals, these animals will exhibit the same behavior of the depressed individual. These include anhedonia (not wanting to do the things you usually take pleasure in) and anxiety-like behavior.

This study also showed that depression is associated with decreased gut microbiota richness and diversity. Further, in humans, fecal microbiota transplants—introducing healthy feces into the microbiome of a diseased person—have been successful in the treatment of gastrointestinal disease and colitis and clostridium difficile infection with an efficacy rate of almost 90%.

Auxiliary Advances

Across the globe, the International Diabetes Federation report 425 million adults (or 1 in 11 adults) with diabetes while the CDC reports 30.3 million in the U.S. (with over 100 million living with diabetes or prediabetes) and 3.4 million in Canada, according to Diabetes Canada.

Diabetes and obesity are oftentimes linked as it is well-documented that obesity has a strong correlation between insulin resistance and diabetes. In a promising and growing area of research using humans, a small clinical trial in the Netherlands showed that a fecal transplant from a lean donor can temporarily improve insulin resistance in obese men.

In another growing area of research, large differences are seen in the gut microbiomes of people with Parkinson’s disease compared with healthy individuals. Further, a study published in the journal Cell show that when fecal microbes from persons with Parkinson’s disease was transferred to mice, they exhibited more severe symptoms of the disease and the aggregation of α-synuclein in the brain. (The formation of plaques in the brain via aggregation of α-synuclein is found in persons with neurodegenerative diseases including Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and dementia.) Meanwhile another study revealed that probiotic supplementation in patients with Alzheimer’s disease showed improved in cognitive function.

But Just How Did We Get Our Microbiome Anyway?

It has been shown that the vaginal and maternal gut microbiome changes significantly during pregnancy. Science journal PLOS|One as well as a Finnish study in Cell, respectively, showed that pregnant women exhibit lower vaginal bacteria than nonpregnant women as well as a lack of population diversity in gut microbiota.

In the International Journal of Obesity, researchers found that children exposed to prenatal antibiotics in the second or third trimester had an 84% higher risk of developing obesity compared to children who were not exposed. Further, Caesarians were linked to 46% higher risks of developing childhood obesity; your first microbe colonizers are acquired via exchanges with your mother largely during the birthing process, when you are—quite literally—slathered in vaginal bacteria.

In addition, as research shows, any disturbance to this microbe exchange such as delivery by C-section, perinatal antibiotics and formula feeding is linked to an increased risk in metabolic and immune disease. After birth, a child’s microbiome continues to grow and is changed by ingestion of the microbes in breast milk which stabilizes neonatal gut microbiome. As we grow older, our gut microbiomes can change throughout life depending on diet, environment and the drugs we may take, such as antibiotics.

So How Do We Promote A Healthy Microbiome?

There is still a lot of ongoing research on the brain-gut-microbiome connection, but it’s quite clear that the gut microbiota can have a significant impact on mood, health and disease. So here are a few ways—and foods!—that will keep your gut microbiome healthy and thriving:

1. Probiotics – research shows they can be used to maintain a healthy gut and restore the gut microbiota to health (after disruption as in the case of illness and the use of antibiotics).
2. Prebiotics foods – these cause the growth and stimulate the activity of beneficial microbes in the gut.
3. Whole grain foods/foods high in fiber – these have been shown to promote the growth of specific bacteria only digested by certain bacterial types. For example, apples and artichokes have been shown to increase Bifidobacteria (a good bacteria) in humans.
4. Fermented foods – people have been eating these foods for centuries. They have been shown to reduce the number of disease-causing bacteria in the gut and promote the growth of beneficial bacteria. It has been shown that people who eat a lot of yogurt have less of the bacteria linked to inflammation (Enterobacteriaceae).
5. Diversity in food – a diet comprising a diversity in food leads to a diverse microbiota which is considered healthy.
6. Polyphenols in red wine and grapes – these have been shown to improve specific beneficial microbiota.

I had always been terrified of giving birth. I called my mother after I watched the first episode of One Born Every Minute and told her, in no uncertain terms, that I was never going to be able to have a baby. She laughed at me and said I would, and she was right. Eight years after that conversation, I was looking at the window on a piss covered litmus stick, where one pink line was darkening up beside another. I burst into tears — I was going to be a parent! — but they weren’t happy tears. Nope, no matter how much I wanted it, I wasn’t ready, because to reach motherhood, I was going to have to give birth.

I frantically Googled things like “pregnant scared to give birth” and “elective caesarean.” I floated the idea of a cheeky C-section with my consultant obstetrician. He told me to put my pants back on as if he hadn’t heard me. Back to Google then, and pretty soon afterwards, I discovered hypnobirthing, a practice that promised I could be so blissed-out during labor I wouldn’t even be aware of the pain. My fears evaporated and I began to study for labour like it was a test.

I received books about natural birth for Christmas and I’d devoured them before the turkey was on the table. I laid them out in the rapidly diminishing triangle of space between my crossed legs every night. I read them in the bath; I dropped them in the bath. I listened to hypnosis tracks that were supposed to tap into my neocortex, and send me into a serenity so deep that I would not feel my daughter leave my body. I bought a diffuser so that I could use holistic oils to transport me to the pain free labors of my past lives (and this is only a mild exaggeration).

My hypnobirthing instructor was a magnificent force who believed in the power of mind over matter, and had not used anesthesia at the dentist in five years. She explained that adrenaline would hinder my labor, and that I needed to create feelings of joy throughout the experience to heighten levels of oxytocin, the body’s “happy hormone,” which would speed everything along. She asked me what I loved more than anything in the world, and without even a passing glance at my husband I said our dog. She advised me to plaster the inside of the car with pictures of the dog, so that our ride to the hospital could be stress-free. I printed out 20 photos of him later that day. Also printed was my birth plan — a neatly bulleted list of exactly how the experience would play out. Double spaced, 12pt, Lucida Serif. On heavy cream vellum paper, like a wedding invitation.

I was doing what I thought I needed to do to bring a child into the world purely and unharmed. I had come to believe that my body was designed to give birth, so giving birth should be easy and, if I just studied hard enough, could be painless. The natural birth movement claims that childbirth used to be safe and easy before the advent of modern medicine and roots for a return to drug-free home birth. When I mentioned this to my husband he said he thought he’d prefer it if I had our baby in the hospital. To be honest, I thought he was a prick for not letting me give birth in our freshly carpeted bedroom, but telling him that didn’t really sit with the new earth mother persona I was curating, so I just smiled serenely and meditated for a while.

I had come to believe that my body was designed to give birth, so giving birth should be easy and, if I just studied hard enough, could be painless.
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When my water broke at 10am one Monday morning I made myself a cup of tea, got into the bath and read my book. Calm mothers have their babies quicker, I’d been told; so I waited, thinking about how in eight hours — or who knows, maybe six if I was really calm — I’d be holding my perfect baby in my arms.

24 hours later I was in the car on the way to the hospital, listening to my hypnobirthing tracks. “Three, two, one,” said the clinically composed female voice through my headphones, “relax, relax, relax.” Just need to get in that birthing pool. Just really. Need to. Just want to feel that nice water. Make it better. Dog pictures not really working. Three, two, one, relax. Dog. Birth pool. Relax. Three. Dogpool.

My contractions were coming every four minutes, but when the midwife took a cursory look at me, she told me I was only one centimeter dilated. “We won’t admit you until you’re 4cm,” she said. “Not enough beds.”

“But I have been in labour for 24 hours,” I argued, worrying I was already ruining my perfect birth experience, “I think it’s time for the birth pool — I think if I could just get in the-”

“You need to go home,” she said.

Four hours later, I was in the car again. I was screaming in pain. I went back into the hospital and told them, under no uncertain terms, that I wanted an epidural. They examined me again and I was only 2cm dilated. “As I mentioned, we don’t normally admit women until they’re 4cm,” the midwife said conversationally, looking from my vagina to my vitals and back again. I didn’t care. I needed relief.

Then, a change of plan. “Your baby is in distress,” said the midwife, looking again at the two heart rates on the screen. “You’ll need to be constantly monitored from here onwards. You won’t be able to have your water birth after all. And we can give you an epidural, if you like.”

Within half an hour, I’d signed a form that gave an anesthetist permission to lodge a huge, hollow needle into my back and absolved me of the right to sue if he paralyzed me. Ten minutes later, I could feel nothing at all from the waist down. “I’m terribly sorry,” I said to the midwife, “I think I swore at you downstairs. That’s not really me. I do apologize.”

“Don’t worry,” she said, “I’ve had much worse.”

My husband stood at my bedside staring at me in uneasy wonder. “The epidural,” he announced, “is modern medicine at its finest.”

Though many ancient cultures attempted to treat the pain of childbirth, for centuries in Western society a biblical misogyny infiltrated the medical care given to those in labor. Christians portrayed pain relief in childbirth as blasphemous, believing it contravened God’s punishment for Eve’s original sin (“I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children” [Genesis 3:16]). According to Steve Ainsworth at Midwives Magazine, incense and prayer (yeah, really) were an accepted analgesic, but “anything else might upset divine intent.”

It wasn’t until the mid nineteenth century that attempts at pain relief during birth began to be widely normalized — by Queen Victoria, no less. Victoria enjoyed a famously rich sexual relationship with her husband, Prince Albert, and bore nine of their children. She hated being pregnant, however, and was “repulsed” by childbirth, developing a keen interest in technological advancements in pain relief as a result. In 1853, during the birth of her eighth child, Prince Leopold, she used chloroform’s anesthetic properties to reduce her labor pains. As the head of the Church of England, her decision signified the church’s direct acceptance of pain relief. Chloroform was subsequently known as “anesthesia à la reine” and was used by doctors to lower labor pain until after the Second World War. 

At around the same time that Victoria was pregnant with Leopold, a French surgeon, Charles Gabriel Pravaz and a Scottish doctor, Alexander Wood, each independently combined a hollow hypodermic needle and a syringe. Wood discovered this could be used to manage neuralgic pain. The epidural progressed in 1885 when neurologist James Leonard Corning injected a dose of cocaine into the sacrum of a healthy man. It went through several updates before reaching its current form of local anesthetic, continually administered by a catheter inserted into the “epidural” space just shy of the spine. It was first used in childbirth in 1909 and began to be regularly employed as pain relief in labor in the 1940s. At that time, although many still believed that pain in childbirth was a necessary part of the experience, more progressive doctors saw that pain relief was vital in creating a safe and healthy birth culture. In 1949, in his presidential address to the Section of Obstetrics of the Royal Academy of Medicine in Ireland, leading obstetrician Dr. O’Donel Browne said:

It is wrong to withhold relief from pain from poor or rich, and the argument that analgesia cannot be made applicable to domiciliary midwifery must not prevent us making every effort to reach that goal. Many difficulties confront us, but I am convinced that we can overcome them with comparative ease if we are prepared to take a little trouble over the problem, and to agree that the slight additional expense is warranted.

Amongst gynecologists, Browne represented a growing movement that recognized the importance of reducing maternal pain regardless of cost. At present, NHS hospitals in the UK aim to provide epidurals free of charge to any woman who requests one. This means that British birthing people are among the luckiest in the world; in the United States in 2016, for example, the average cost of an epidural was $2,312. But British people’s choice to labor pain free, for free, has been threatened before. In 2006, the Education and Research Committee of the Royal College of Midwives recommended charging for the procedure. Maureen Treadwell of the Birth Trauma Association said:

The women least able to pay would get the rawest deal. Some professional women can just put the cost of an epidural on their plastic cards but women who can’t afford it will suffer.

She went on to describe a woman who had been persuaded by a midwife not to have an epidural and was left with post traumatic stress disorder as a result of the unrelieved pain. Indeed, recent research has shown that the administration of an epidural during childbirth can reduce the possibility of postnatal depression and conditions such as PTSD. This could be a very important factor for expectant mothers with existing depression or anxiety to take into account — but unfortunately, it is still not widely shared. More research found that amongst pregnant people who had been intending to deliver naturally but chose to receive pain relief during their labor, levels of postnatal depression were higher. Understandably, for those who have invested large amounts of time, energy and money in the natural birth movement, a feeling of failure follows the use of pain relief in childbirth.

Scratch the surface of the natural birth movement and you’ll find disturbing, decidedly anti-feminist roots. Fernand Lamaze is arguably the most famous player in the natural childbirth game, a French obstetrician who developed the psychoprophylactic, or ‘Lamaze’ method of childbirth, which puts focus on breathing and massage. Lamaze thought little of his patients, and reportedly ranked the “performance” of the laboring women on his ward from ‘excellent’ to ‘complete failure.’” Other male obstetricians such as Robert Bradley and Grantly Dick-Read (his real name, I shit you not), both sons of farmers, developed techniques for unmedicated births based their methods on delivering calves. According to obstetrician Amy Tueter MD, Dick-Read’s method centered the premise that “‘inferior’ people were having more children than their ‘betters’ portending ‘race suicide’ of the white middle and upper classes.” Meanwhile, Bradley became the key proponent of Husband-Coached Childbirth. Oh yes, you read that right; he literally trademarked mansplaining giving birth. 

More research found that amongst pregnant people who had been intending to deliver naturally but chose to receive pain relief during their labor, levels of postnatal depression were higher.
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More progressive doctors claimed that these techniques “needlessly primitivized” birth — I’d go further, and argue that these doctors entirely fictionalized new reasons for labor pains to better suit their agenda. Dick-Read’s technique, which predated Lamaze’s, was premised on the idea that contractions were a result of unnatural physical tension caused by fear. This is categorically untrue. Contractions are the result of the pituitary gland releasing oxytocin and causing the uterus to tense and relax which pushes the baby down into the birth canal. Dick-Read, Lamaze, and Bradley must have known that: it was discovered by Sir Henry Dale in 1906. It’s not fear that hurts in this situation (but if you’re scared, I don’t blame you), and yet a multi billion dollar industry has been born from that lie. In the US, C-sections are at an all time high, and many women are given them simply because they are convenient for the doctor, and often more lucrative for the hospital. It makes sense, then, that there’s a social movement in favor of natural birth among people who feel like their agency is depleted in an over-medicalized system. I gave birth in the UK, where healthcare is free and natural birth is encouraged by hospitals, as it works out cheaper for them. I took the information I was given and ended up at hypnobirthing, believing all I read about stress causing maternal pain.

It’s not fear that hurts in this situation (but if you’re scared, I don’t blame you), and yet a multi billion dollar industry has been born from that lie.
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It turns out, however, you don’t have to listen to a movement started by cisgender men in the 1940s that likens you to a laboring cow. In 2004, the American Congress of OB/GYN and The American Society of Anesthesiologists put out a joint statement to remind us that, “there is no other circumstance where it is considered acceptable for an individual to experience untreated severe pain, amenable to safe intervention, while under a physician’s care.”

My pregnancy was as far from happy as I could imagine. I was diagnosed fairly early on with Symphysis Pubis Dysfunction (SPD), a condition caused by the hormonal loosening of the pelvic ligaments, which leaves the pelvis misaligned and causes constant physical pain so intense that it’s difficult for some sufferers to walk. The only thing that relieves SPD is delivering your baby, and because I was preparing to use hypnobirthing, I was excited to do it.

In the time leading up to my daughter’s birth, I was calm, and when I reflected on it later, I was glad I’d used hypnobirthing to those ends; but that’s because, in spite of the unwitting danger I put myself and my child in, we escaped harm. We are lucky. Many people have lost babies through the dogmatic approach to natural birth that certain hospitals adopt.

Hypnobirthing is grounded in the teachings of Dick-Read, Lamaze and Bradley; the same old misogynistic doctrine that women are animals and pain is empowering. It is repackaged for the modern, middle class mother; the book I bought, with its cover image of a beautiful, serenely pregnant woman lying on a huge taupe cushion looked more like the front of an Ibiza lounge compilation CD. It’s assumed that you have enough free time to lie in bed meditating to 12 six-minute-long hypnosis tracks a day. These are mostly compiled of a woman, who I always imagined to be the pregnant Ibiza lounge woman, slowly repeating the words, “three, two, one, relax, relax, relax.” As if it were that easy.

I wasn’t frightened about giving birth because I never imagined the type of birth I was actually going to have. I readily believed everything I read about my body being expressly designed to cough out a child. Because of that, and because I thought that my body’s production of oxytocin would be halted if my natural laboring rhythm was interrupted, I wrote into my birth plan that I didn’t want to be touched during labour, and — as is very common in hypnobirthing — I included internal examinations in this.

Unfortunately, I only discovered in the middle of my labor that the natural birth movement doesn’t account for any of the problems that I encountered. It doesn’t acknowledge that, of the four different pelvis shapes, only one is deemed medically “ideal” for labor. It misses out the babies that are positioned back to back, breech, transverse or in a “brow” presentation — coming out face first, like a little sloth — like mine was, which is the cause of 6% of maternal mortalities worldwide. No amount of oxytocin was going to help me with that.

If I’d ignored my hypnobirthing rulebook and allowed an earlier internal exam, they might have picked up my daughter’s position. By the time I consented and the midwives realized she was brow, she was too far down the birth canal to be delivered by caesarean; I was given an episiotomy and she was pulled out by ventouse, at which point the doctors realized that her dropping heart rate had been caused by the umbilical cord which was wrapped around her neck, constricting her every time my body contracted.

Unfortunately, I only discovered in the middle of my labor that the natural birth movement doesn’t account for any of the problems that I encountered.
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Natural childbirth relies on a tightrope walk between oxytocin, the aforementioned “happy” or “love” hormone, and, latterly, adrenaline, which produces a “fight or flight” response in humans. Telling a woman to refuse medical exams, keep calm and look at pictures of puppies to release a flow of oxytocin will only work to speed up her birth if she and her baby are perfectly positioned for it.  My belief that I could give birth completely naturally hindered my labor.

It doesn’t fit with the hypnobirthing mission statement to condone deviation from the birth plan, so stories like mine do not make it into hypnobirthing books. One of the first things I noticed when I began to be visibly pregnant was the startling regularity with which other women would go out of their way to tell me stories about their births. Some of them were horrific, whilst others dismissed my ideas about how I wanted to give birth. Hypnobirthing discourages all but the most perfect narratives, and anyone who begins a hypnobirthing “journey” is advised to ask other women not to mention any negative birth experiences. What’s more, if you do an online search for phrases like “hypnobirthing back to back birth” or “hypnobirthing brow presentation,” there are exactly zero results that discuss hypnobirthing in these circumstances. Yet these are very real risks that accompany every single pregnancy and it is at least disingenuous, at most very dangerous, for a widely used method to erase the existence of these stories.

The fact is that every birth is different, and there is not one “journey” that is better than another. The acceptance of pain relief to avoid post traumatic stress disorder is not “failure,” and anyone making money out of telling you so does not have the best interests of you, or your baby, at heart. Whether it comes from midwives, the Old Testament or hypnobirthing instructors: the vilification of the epidural is nothing but misogyny under another name.

The first time I remember wanting to be a mom was when my little sister was born, 12 days before my sixth birthday. The first time we took her out I carried her around proudly and called her “my baby.” Not “my sister” or “my baby sister,” “my baby.”

Since then, I’ve known, without a single doubt, that I wanted to be a mother. I’ve loved the children I’ve cared for as a childcare provider, but I’ve known that the love I had for each of them would pale in comparison to the love I would have for my own child. I’ve loved many people, but I know none of them have been my one true love; my one true love will be my child.

On May 25, I took two pregnancy tests, and they both turned positive. Those two tests sat on my bathroom counter, and every time I saw them, they confirmed that my one true love was alive inside me. But just days after finding out I was pregnant, my OB told me she was concerned about an ectopic pregnancy because I’d had surgery on my reproductive organs to treat endometriosis only two months earlier. She ordered some tests and while waiting for the results, I decided to take another pregnancy test, just to be sure. But that test only showed one line: not pregnant.

Heartbreak isn’t a strong enough word to describe the agony I felt sitting on the bathroom floor staring at that negative pregnancy test. I cried the way that mothers do in movies when they lose their children—a kind of crying that I always thought was exaggerated for dramatic effect. For five weeks my baby was alive inside of me. Part of me. When my baby died I felt the absence inside of me, like a piece of of me was suddenly gone.

On The Fear Of Pregnancy Loss In The First Trimester
theestablishment.co

I want to be clear that this is my individual experience of pregnancy and pregnancy loss. We all have different opinions about when a pregnancy constitutes a life, and all those opinions are valid. The moment I knew I was pregnant, I became immediately attached to that life. This does not happen for all women and that is completely fine. Each experience is different. This one is mine.

In my grief-addled brain, I desperately tried to make sense of what had happened, and only two explanations seemed to fit: either this was all part of some universal plan that I didn’t understand, or my body, which had failed me so many times already, had failed again.

A lot of what people said in their attempts to comfort me was along the lines of the “universal plan” explanation. Most people don’t know what to say when confronted with the enormity of someone else’s grief, so they resort to cliches like “everything happens for a reason” and “nothing happens in God’s world by mistake” and “on the other side of every struggle is a lesson.”

Either this was all part of some universal plan that I didn’t understand, or my body, which had failed me so many times already, had failed again.
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When I was struggling in the past, I found cliches like this comforting. But when faced with the loss of a child, they sounded hollow and cruel. How could there be some kind of lesson in this loss? What purpose could a higher power have for taking a baby from me? How could there be beauty on the other side of this?

I was forced to reexamine my beliefs on a higher power and the universe, and I came to the conclusion that I don’t believe in a higher power or a universe that would take my baby as part of some greater plan or to teach me a lesson about resilience or least of all to punish me for my past sins. And without an external force to blame for doing this to me, all that I was left with was the conclusion that my body had done this to me. My body had rejected a baby that it somehow couldn’t support.

My body was an easy target for my anger and hatred and pain because I was so accustomed to hating my body. I can’t really remember a time when I was comfortable in my body. What I do remember is the constant battle I waged against my body and the battle I felt my body had waged against me.

The Criminalization of Miscarriage Makes Me Fear My Eating Disorder
theestablishment.co

When I got my period, my body and I very quickly became enemies. The flood of hormones brought crippling depression. I started to gain weight, which is completely normal during puberty, but I compounded this weight gain by overeating to cope with the depression that had turned my world monochromatic. Within a few years of getting my period I was “the fat kid” and got bullied relentlessly.

A couple of years after my period began, I started showing symptoms of what would be diagnosed, 12 years later, as endometriosis. Every month my cramps were so painful that I could barely move, sometimes so painful that I would vomit. I would bleed so heavily that I had to change my tampon between every class. The weeks surrounding my period would bring awful GI problems that left me running to the bathroom as often as I could.

By the time I was in high school, it was clear to me that this fat, malfunctioning body which tortured me all the time was my enemy. So, I started on my quest to tame the wild body that made me feel so out of control, to make it more acceptable. What started as a “diet and exercise plan” quickly morphed into an eating disorder that would rule my life for the next 12 years. It was easy to punish a body that made me feel so awful, physically and emotionally. I believed it was what my body deserved.

My body was an easy target for my anger and hatred and pain because I was so accustomed to hating my body.
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When I finally got into treatment for my eating disorder, I was ready to make peace with my body, but I wasn’t prepared for what that would entail. When I stopped using eating disorder behaviors I gained a lot of weight. Suddenly, I was the fat kid again, and I hated my body more than I ever had, even before the eating disorder ever started.

I was confronted with the fact that my body, when it is healthy, is an overweight body. I can force my body to be thin by depriving it and pushing it beyond its limits and punishing it constantly, but when I am kind to my body and feed it when it needs to be fed and move it only as much as it wants to move, my body wants to be fat. And that’s when I decided that, if I was ever going to be happy again, I had to accept my fat body exactly as it was. Which was exactly as hard as it sounded.

I found a really good therapist who helped me see the connection between my core beliefs that I was broken and not good enough and not worthy of love and the way that I treated my myself. And how my belief that I deserved bad things and that they were my fault meant I’d never be free from them.

Over the course of several months, I used eating disorder behaviors less, and finally, I stopped. I started hiking and doing yoga—activities that allowed me to be present in my body and see what my body was capable of doing. Slowly, I began to view my body as a vessel for my experiences in the world rather than a symbol of my value to the world.

Eventually, I didn’t really think about my body that much at all. I could walk by a mirror and look or not look, and if I did look it wouldn’t ruin my day. That was my version of accepting my body.

Acceptance was as far as I’d gotten before I got pregnant. Being pregnant was the first time I’d ever really felt at home in my body, completely okay with my body. I’d wanted to be pregnant my whole life, and when I finally was, everything felt right. This body I had hated for years was no longer my enemy.

But just as quickly as the peace was made, it was shattered. When I miscarried I felt betrayed by my body. Betrayed by a body whose reproductive system had never worked quite right. A body that was my prison while it suffered through a chronic illness. A body that had just gone through surgery to remove endometriosis so I could get pregnant. A body that I had never really liked in the first place, no matter how thin I got. A body which I had beaten and starved and mistreated for years. A body that had given me a baby and then taken it away.

I wondered how could I continue to live in my body, a body that apparently hated me as much as I hated it. Why else would it give me the one thing I wanted more than anything and then take it away?

In the aftermath of my miscarriage, I wanted to hurt my body as much as it had hurt me. But to my surprise, I found that I couldn’t. There were days where the grief was so overwhelming that I forgot to eat, but when I purposely tried to restrict or force myself to exercise when I didn’t want to, it didn’t provide the sense of relief or control that it used to. There have been times when intrusive thoughts about self harm have taken over my brain, but I couldn’t bring myself to actually act on them.

In the aftermath of my miscarriage, I wanted to hurt my body as much as it had hurt me. But to my surprise, I found that I couldn’t.
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No matter how angry I am at this body that has betrayed me, no matter how much I hate it for taking my baby from me, I can’t hurt it anymore. I’ve learned to value my body and myself too much to cause myself harm.

I’m beginning to understand that the anger and hatred I’ve been directing at my body is misplaced. When grief is too excruciating, it’s much easier to turn to more accessible emotions and direct them at something more concrete than the abstract experience of loss. It’s much easier to assign blame to my faulty body than it is to accept that my miscarriage just happened—that there isn’t any reason or explanation. But doing what’s easy and rationalizing away grief doesn’t allow healing.

I’m starting to engage in the much more difficult process of accepting and forgiving rather than blaming and harming. I know it’s going to be a long process, but by now, my body can handle it.