And I said to my body softly, “I want to be your friend.” It took a long breath and replied, “I have been waiting my whole life for this.” –Nayyirah Waheed
I used to live a very disembodied life. It’s not that I wasn’t aware of my body: as a female, I was made aware of it at least once a month. But after that, I went back into my head, only really noticing my body if it was injured, or if my butt looked particularly good in a pair of jeans.
After I got married and we began “trying” for children, I began to pay more attention to how my body worked. My knowledge was dismal. I didn’t know a woman could only get pregnant during a specific “fertile window” each month, or that fertility isn’t a given, especially as you age. As I considered myself an informed woman, I was surprised that I was ignorant of such basic facts. I’ve since learned such ignorance among women is not uncommon.
At age 31, I came across a book called The Big Lie: Motherhood, Feminism, and the Reality of the Biological Clock. Inspired by her own experiences struggling to have children in her late thirties, author Tanya Selvaratnam reports on the phenomenon of women delaying motherhood only to find that they aren’t able to have children when they desire to. A combination of personal narrative, statistics, and social commentary, the book calls for more honesty and education about female fertility. I related so deeply to Selvaratnam’s story and calls for action. As I saw negative after negative on pregnancy tests, my frustration and resentment began to grow. How could our society have failed to teach women such fundamental information about their own bodies?
For decades, women have been taught to spend their twenties and thirties focusing on getting an education and establishing a career. But most women want to be mothers, too, and these decades are their most fertile years.A basic understanding of our reproductive systems—known as fertility awareness—should be common knowledge among both men and women. It is not. Ignorance is not empowering. Delaying motherhood isn’t always putting off the choice about whether to have children; often, it’s letting time make that choice for you.
Women’s rights activists often focus on ensuring that women’s lives aren’t disrupted by an unplanned pregnancy. But, increasingly, an unintended lack of pregnancy is the bigger problem. “Americans are improving their ability to avoid unwanted pregnancies far faster than they are improving the ability to achieve desired pregnancy,” writes demographer Lyman Stone in the New York Times. The “fertility gap”—the difference between the number of children that women say they want to have and the number they actually end up having—continues to grow. Selvaratnam quotes the founder of the American Fertility Association, Pamela Madsen, who says: “I cringe when feminists say giving women reproductive knowledge is pressuring them to have a child. Reproductive freedom is not just the ability to not have a child through birth control. It’s also the ability to have one if and when you want one.”
By exalting birth control and abortion as the foundation of women’s well-being, mainstream feminism has contributed to the devaluing of maternal bodies. Women deserve a fuller understanding of their own bodies, including their fertility, so that they can make an active choice about whether and when to have children. They also deserve a healthcare system that understands and values the female body. Ultimately, women deserve to live in harmony with their bodies, not in ignorance or fear.
Female Body Literacy
A deep understanding of one’s own body as a woman is not just important for achieving or preventing pregnancy. Cycle knowledge can also be used to help manage energy and time in a way that is both effective and compassionate. Unlike men’s bodies, women’s bodies are simply not the same every day; the hormonal shifts throughout the various phases of our menstrual cycle can powerfully affect us. When we choose to work with our biochemical rhythms instead of against them, this can have a profound impact on our lives. All young women should receive education and mentorship that helps them to develop body literacy.
The menstrual cycle is also a primary marker of our health and well-being as women. Yet even medical providers are often not sufficiently knowledgeable about the healthy, natural functions of the female body.
In her 2019 book Everything Below the Waist: Why Health Care Needs a Feminist Revolution, Jennifer Block documents many of the ways that the medical system misunderstands and devalues female bodies. Female pain is often dismissed by providers, and conditions of the female reproductive system are often misdiagnosed or missed altogether, or offered quick fixes that prioritize convenience and profit without attempts to find a root cause. Women are widely prescribed hormonal birth control as a band-aid solution to “female problems” of any kind, an intervention that halts their natural cycles altogether and has side effects that are beginning to surface in both academic and public discourse. Yet, when women try to speak up about the harm hormonal birth control has caused them, too often they are dismissed or mocked.
The lack of female body literacy in healthcare runs deep. The practice of medicine—from the education of physicians to standards of care to the research that informs the practice—is fundamentally biased in favor of male bodies. Cycling women, for example, are often excluded from trials for prescription drugs, since their fluctuating hormones could complicate data analysis. As British journalist Caroline Criado Perez, author of Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, puts it: “For millennia, medicine has functioned on the assumption that male bodies can represent humanity as a whole.” But women make up half of the human race, and they deserve medical care that is based on an accurate understanding of how their bodies actually work.
Healthcare, Agency, and the Maternal Body
The options set before women at the doctor’s office seem to presume that their fertile female bodies are to be managed and controlled—at any cost—instead of understood and supported.
When they do become pregnant, women often experience serious mistreatment within our medical system, ranging from coercion to outright physical violation. In her 1992 tome Birth as an American Rite of Passage, anthropologist Robbie Davis-Floyd analyzes the technocratic worldview that underlies our system of birth in the United States, which leads to high rates of trauma due to overly medicalized protocols and a lack of agency during the birth process.
Although the increasing influence of the natural birth movement has helped to improve women’s treatment during pregnancy, labor, and delivery, more than three decades after the publication of Davis-Floyd’s book serious problems remain. Today, the rate of caesarean sections in the United States is still over 32 percent. (The World Health Organization estimates that the rate should be somewhere between 10 and 15 percent.) Up to 45 percent of mothers experience birth trauma, and 17 percent of postpartum mothers meet the clinical criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder. Mothers in the United States also experience utterly insufficient postpartum care, where the standard protocol is one in-clinic appointment six weeks after the birth.
When women are routinely given sub-optimal medical care, mainstream feminism’s myopic focus on abortion seems misplaced—even counterproductive. In her 2024 book Mothers, Children, and The Body Politic, scholar Nadya Williams writes: “This choice to prioritize conversations about whether abortion is a form of health care, instead of directing further resources to support expecting mothers and their babies, is a dramatic statement about our society’s undervaluing of babies and mothers.” Mothers are also women, as it turns out, and any feminism worthy of the name must include them in its advocacy.
I can get on board with the feminist cry for agency over our own bodies, but there are so many areas where this agency is lacking that precede the ending of a pregnancy. How much agency can we have over our bodies when we don’t even understand how they work? When it’s normal for our doctors to not look closely at our cycles but to recommend one-size-fits-all pharmaceutical products and invasive surgeries as solutions to female problems? When we’re not believed about our embodied experiences and are condescended to by medical providers and media alike? Regardless of where one stands on the moral issue of abortion, it seems logical to expand our idea of what it means to fight for reproductive justice.
Working for Change
A decade later, at 41, I’ve finally learned how to live a life of deep connection to and awareness of my female body. It’s the empowerment I didn’t know I needed. I’m now doing what I can to try to reduce the number of women who learn fertility awareness, body literacy and holistic female health late in life as I did—or never.
In the 1980s, German doctor Elisabeth Raith-Paula was beginning dissertation work on fertility awareness. She was surprised by the things she hadn’t been taught about the female reproductive system in medical school, and she created a class for women to share what she was learning. The class was so moving and impactful for the women who attended—adult women, many of whom had already birthed babies—that it soon grew and expanded. It’s now a five-hour interactive workshop for nine to twelve-year-old girls called The Cycle Show.
Having completed the training to teach the course myself, I’ll now be spending some of my Saturdays trying to set a foundation of knowledge and respect for the female body for future generations. I’ll be sitting on the floor showing girls models of the uterus, ovaries, cervix and vagina, explaining female hormones and their functions, and illustrating the complex monthly cycle that is the foundation of it all. I’ll explain the extraordinary reality that it’s in female bodies where new life is developed and sustained. I’ll talk positively about birth and breastfeeding as physiological phenomena that are to be honored and supported. I’m hopeful that the girls who experience this workshop will go on to make truly informed decisions about their bodies in a culture that so often either ignores or overtly devalues them.
When there is knowledge about our bodies, our bodies will be treated with respect. When our bodies are not understood—and are seen as problems to be fixed—they won’t be. But we don’t have to wait for our culture to change; we can and should help create that change by educating ourselves and sharing our knowledge with others. The Cycle Show’s motto is “I can only protect what I value and respect.” If knowledge is power, then a lack of knowledge is a lack of power. This is truly a feminist issue.
Fertility awareness, body literacy, and respectful, knowledgeable care from medical professionals: these are matters of reproductive justice. It’s time for feminists of all stripes to work together to ensure deep understanding and dignified treatment of female bodies.
