The society promotes pregnancy as a beautiful, joyful experience women cherish. Pregnancy is a dangerous medical condition costing women their health and sometimes even their lives.
So Much Can Go Wrong.
Even the best pregnancies aren’t without minor complications, but no one knows how their body will react to pregnancy until they’re pregnant.
Here’s just a tiny sampling of the dangers and complications pregnant people face.
Morning Sickness
Morning sickness is one of the most common pregnancy complications. Some women have it far worse, unable to keep anything down for months.
Gestational Diabetes
Some women randomly develop diabetes during pregnancy, which increases their blood pressure and may lead to a more difficult birth experience.
Hair/teeth loss
The fetus’s needs come first. It will leech the mother of essential nutrients, sometimes leading to hair loss and teeth loss.
Preeclampsia
This dangerous condition inhibits proper organ function. Preeclampsia causes high blood pressure, headaches, blurred vision, and more. The condition can lead to maternal death if not treated properly.
Ectopic Pregnancy
Fertilized eggs don’t always attach to the uterine wall where they belong. Sometimes they get stuck elsewhere, like in the fallopian tube. Because there’s no room to grow, these pregnancies eventually rupture, resulting in death if not treated swiftly.
Placenta Problems
The placenta can detach from the uterine wall or grow in the wrong spot, resulting in many problems for the mother. Placenta problems can cause bleeding, tenderness, and birth complications.
Sepsis
Sepsis claims responsibility for 15% of all maternal deaths worldwide. Sepsis is your body’s reaction to infection. Any infection can trigger a response resulting in sepsis.
Anemia
Mild anemia is common during pregnancy, meaning many pregnant women suffer from iron deficiency. It can make it more difficult to fight infections during pregnancy and cause increased blood loss during delivery.
Blood Clots
Pregnant women are at high risk for blood clots due to changes their bodies make in preparation for childbirth. However, these blood clots could cause serious complications, including death, if they reach the brain, heart, or lungs.
Mental Health Deterioration
Pregnancy creates numerous physical complications, but it also impacts women’s mental health. Hormonal changes due to pregnancy can lead to depression and anxiety.
The Horror of Child Birth
This list showcasing the hidden dangers of pregnancy doesn’t even delve into the horrors women experience in childbirth. Labor and delivery lead to a completely different host of ill health effects, ranging from short-term complications to lifelong disability and even death.
Women Need the Truth
Many websites highlighting pregnancy complications focus on the risk to the baby, neglecting the genuine dangers for the mother.
Women need to know the truth about how pregnancy and childbirth can affect their mental, physical, and emotional well-being.
Women Deserve a Choice
Even this tiny list of possible complications highlights the desperate fight for women’s reproductive choices. Many will paint pregnancy as a minor inconvenience; however, it’s anything but. It’s a nine-month-long ordeal rife with complications that can lead to permanent disability and even death.
Forcing anyone else to undergo similar trauma would be a clear human rights violation, so why isn’t it when the victim is a woman?
Pregnant Women Must Be Celebrated
Women who know the risk and choose to bring children into the world despite it deserve praise. However, they also deserve time to heal and a society that supports them through pregnancy and the trials and tribulations of raising humanity’s next generation.
Proof Misogyny Thrives in Our Society
Forcing women to undergo the horrific medical condition that is pregnancy is only one example of the rampant misogyny thriving in society. Here are 24 more examples of everyday sexism women face.