Women’s rights have been dismantled since I gave birth
When my son was a few weeks old I started writing my first book. My milk came in and, finally, so did the words. Neither came easy at first, but a decade on I wonder if the difficulty, frustration, tenderness, and the damn constraints were what birthed the book. That I wrote not in spite of the pram in the hall, but because of it.
Throughout my pregnancy I had been quietly baking this strange, probably unpublishable idea. And yet to use a pregnancy term, it seemed viable. So in tandem with the foetus fattening in my belly I continued to plot a book of nine essays charting the nine months of pregnancy and birth. I couldn’t write it, I was too busy with its subject, but I did start to read. And as I read I became increasingly struck by how little I knew about what was happening to me, month by month. How little I understood the silences breeding across centuries. How little I knew the story of how I, and virtually everyone else who has ever been born, began. How could I write about what had happened to me? How could I not write about it?
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Mothering is a practical business. So, too, is writing. As I wrote my son transitioned from newborn to toddler. He crawled. He walked. He spoke. He jumped. He spun things. He tried to pluck the moon from the sky. Meanwhile I took voluntary redundancy from my full-time job as a journalist and with the money bought the gift which all mothers are desperate to be given. Time. (You can’t, unless you’re really loaded, buy sleep.) I looked after the baby and wrote. I paid a childminder to look after the baby and wrote. I jettisoned the advice to sleep while the baby slept and wrote. I wrote straight after feeds when the baby was sated, opening my laptop with buzzing breasts and brain. (Letdown is a very electric feeling.) I wrote on park benches, one hand tapping the black glass of a tablet, the other pushing the buggy back and forth in the unending project to keep the baby sleeping. I wrote instead of taking a shower. I wrote as though my life, by which I mean my sense of self, depended on it. Which, in a way, it did.
A memoir is a document of the times as well as a life. Rereading Expecting, which came out when literary memoirs taking the subjects of pregnancy, birth, and motherhood seriously were very much not a thing, I am struck by all that has happened in the intervening years. It is beyond the scope of this essay to list all the heartbreaking ways in which our rights have been dismantled during the past decade. I will mention only a few examples. Here in the UK, where I birthed and was birthed, the number of women dying during pregnancy or soon after childbirth has reached its highest level in almost 20 years.
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Asian women are twice as likely to die as white women are during pregnancy or soon after birth; black women three times more likely. In Italy the right-wing government has ordered councils to cease registration of children born to same-sex couples, effectively removing mothers from their children’s birth certificates. Maternal death rates are rising again in many countries and in 2020, a woman died every two minutes from preventable causes related to pregnancy. On June 24, 2022, the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, ending the federal right to an abortion. Twenty-one US states have since banned or restricted abortion. The time for writing the stories of our bodies, for fighting with and for them with all the tools at our disposal — our words, our feet, our votes — more than ever, is now.
Expecting by Chitra Ramaswamy (Saraband/Contraband £9.99). Buy from timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members. Visit audible.co.uk to download the audiobook, which is read by Ramaswamy (£18.99)