6 days Ago By Nell Frizzell
In 2016, I wrote that, for the first time in my life, I felt that the tendrils of American politics had pushed themselves inside my body. The barrier of my skin, my bones and the Atlantic Ocean were not enough to keep this threat away. Trump’s election win in 2016 reached right inside my womb and made me question whether it would ever be safe, ever be right, to have children.
And here I am again. Only this time, I am already pregnant . Pregnant, in fact, with a baby that might well grow up to be a girl, a future woman, and someone with a pussy.
So what does it mean, as a parent, to be carrying a child at a time when misogyny is getting possibly its greatest current political representative? What does it mean to be pregnant when a man who explicitly disrespects, distrusts and exploits women has been given the power not just over women’s bodies but women’s future too? How do those of us who are going to be giving birth in a Trump era move towards our due dates? Well, firstly, by taking dominion over our bodies, to whatever extent we can. It may be true that on some mornings a squatting toad of fear and dread sits in my stomach, licking at my heart. But I also have the power to fight against that fear.
This doesn’t mean looking away but looking out. It means talking to American friends, to other parents, to religious people, to older people and particularly to men and boys about what is happening and who needs looking after. It means campaigning for the bodily autonomy and rights of women, specifically in my case as someone who has been pregnant and given birth.
It means using my authority over the men who wish to control my fertility. When they talk about heartbeats, foetuses, a miracle of life, those are words. I – and anyone who has ever been pregnant, for however long – have felt those things.
We are the authority. We are the ones who know of which we speak. As a mother and a woman, I feel the duty to speak up in the interests of the vulnerable and the marginalised because many people are made vulnerable and pushed to the margins precisely because they are women.
I am lucky. And that luck brings with it responsibilities. Secondly, it means looking in.
Into your family, your home and your body. I cannot control the world, but I can control how I respond to it. I can choose to be rational, to be hopeful, to be gentle.
I can involve myself in my community, go outside, offer help and try to sleep. I can cook meals for people who have recently given birth, look after people’s children after school and stand in a nature reserve and take a moment to watch a bird eating from a thistle. These may not seem like obvious acts of rebellion but they are acts of care, and care is what can shore me up against despair.
Also, I am mother to a boy . That boy will quite possibly enter secondary school while Trump is in power. He will face all the challenges and privileges that characterise modern masculinity.
I want to love, support and help him to do so, in the hope that he can resist the anger, fear and bitterness that characterises so much of the rhetoric coming from Trump and his supporters. I think care may be the key to that, too. As for my body, I want to remember that in creating a child I am not just opening myself up to risk, worry and frailty; I am also embodying an act of power and strength that no President of the United States has ever matched.
Not one. As a friend and former midwife put it to a group of us last week: “It’s a well kept secret, how brave and strong labouring women are. Unlike, for example, ‘warriors’ to whom the same adjectives are often applied, and of whom many statues are cast.
” Pregnant people are not warriors. We’re stronger than that..
