Reply to If your birth(s) happened 150 years ago,

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I would but my baby might not be. But also I only had one pregnancy at 36 and 37 and if I lived 150 years ago odds are very good I would have had more pregnancies starting younger whether I wanted to or not and who knows what would have happened. Like 150 years ago rape was legal and birth control didn't exist and abortion was a back alley deal that was super dangerous and giving birth was mysterious and often deadly. So like it's pretty hard to say exactly what my reproductive experience would have been except to say that it woud have been very different and I would have had a lot less agency.

One thing I do wonder about though is what PPD was like back then and how it was even conceptualized as I had a horrible experience with PPD. But one of the things I discussed with my therapist was how it was hard sometimes to know how much of my PPD was a just inevitable hormonal imbalance and how much was living in a world and having a life that simply did not accommodate the natural hormonal swings of pregnancy and childbirth. Like it didn't make me long for a simpler time because of all the aforementioned rape and lack of reproductive agency but also there was pretty obviously a link for me between being expected to give birth and then return to work and life as though it had not happened and the mental health problems I had that first year. I wonder how that experience would have been different in an earlier time. On the one hand I would have been written off as a crazy hysterical woman but on the other hand this might have been considere a more "normal" response to childbirth. Perhaps. I don't actually know.

It's an interesting thought experiment for sure.[/quote]

You would have to return to work within days.  Have you ever done a load of laundry by hands?  Do you know how much laundry newborns create?  How about cooking everything from scratch?  Cleaning?  Taking care of your other kids?

I grew up in a different country, without a washing machine or disposable diapers.  I remember when my brother was born, my parents were doing laundry 24/7.[/quote]

Yes there was way more physical labor back then and yes women gave birth and then immediately returned to their physical labor.

However what women didn't do is go back into offices and other workplaces away from their babies and pump milk on their breaks while feeling the physical pain of missing their newborns (or go through the hormonal crash of stopping breastfeeding). They didn't return to staff meetings and talking to clients where they would be expected to behave as though they didn't just grow and give birth to a brand new human who is out in the world somewhere away from them being cared for by someone else for some reason.

The world was a physically harsher and deadlier place 150 years ago. But it was in some ways a more sensical place from a mental perspective and the idea of motherhood was a bit more integrated with the lives that women actually led.[/quote]

This is an incredibly naive take. Returning to staff meetings and talking to clients while your baby is with a caregiver you selected is pretty low intensity stuff. And the part about women 150 years ago not having to “give birth to a brand new human who is out in the world somewhere away from them” completely overlooks women who had to work as wet nurses and domestics shortly after giving birth to their own children.  The comment also overlooks the abuse that a good portion of women who had their babies with them in their own homes would have faced on top of everything else they had to do.[/quote]

I don't think you understand that no one is making the argument that women have it harder now. Obviously it's better to give birth in 2024 than in 1874.

But we do have high rates of PPD and PPA in the US and it's reasonable to ask why. You blow off returning to work in an environment where you are expected to behave as though you did not just give birth as "low intensity stuff" betraying the obvious fact that you didn't have PPD or PPA or even worse post-partum psychosis. It is not "low intensity" for some women. It can be fatal.

Also obviously people are aware that low (and no) wage women have been forced back into the workplace forever and that many women face abuse at home. That is horrible. It dies not mean that women who suffer from PPD need to shut up and sit down.[/quote]

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