CALL YOUR MOM #004: fear of pregnancy

toxic positivity is the enemy of grace

Welcome back to CALL YOUR MOM, an open conversation for anyone who needs help getting unstuck and finding what makes them come alive. My messages are open; send me your questions!

Dear Helen,

I consider myself part of the pronatalist, family-friendly, pro-life movement. I’m the oldest of four and was so blessed by my family and upbringing. Lord willing, I would love a large family. I’m 24 and have been married for about a year. We made a prudential decision to postpone trying for kids while we navigated an unexpected and destabilizing international move for work, but now things have started to settle. The possibility returns to mind, always.

I am surprised at finding a nagging resistance in myself. Upon reflection, I can see that it’s rooted in fear of pregnancy, infertility, and miscarriage. This fear has propelled me towards seeking more knowledge, for better and worse.

I sense I've reached the limit of how far an intellectual approach can take me here. I know that I’m called to courage, trust, and action. But I feel lost trying to face that fear, knowing that I could choose to more decisively open the door to a kind of suffering I feel inadequate to face. Any advice for me?

Love,

Scared to Start

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Dear Scared to Start,

First of all, congratulations on the marriage. I’m glad to hear things are starting to settle. I am very glad to respond to your message in particular, because I think many more women experience an arresting fear of pregnancy than talk about it openly. Thank you for the opportunity.

I’ll answer your explicit question directly, but before I do that, I want to remark on something else, something you seemed to say without saying. You opened by identifying yourself within a political movement. That’s an interesting choice! I can’t help but wonder if it’s because, like me, you know that in the “pronatalist, family-friendly, pro-life movement,” there seems to be very little room to express trepidation about motherhood without extreme qualification. Maybe you feel the need to couch your question in a preemptive defense because you have the sense that you’re not “allowed” to feel fear about this.

First of all, if this rings true, I don’t blame you — I see a growing tendency in these circles to counter culturally ambient, hyperbolic negativity toward pregnancy with equally hyperbolic, toxic positivity (read this piece by

Jeff Giesea

) bordering on denial and delusion. Today’s conservative women learn to live with a conscience bound by memes: “If you’re not trad, you’re a bad mom!” “Giving birth is as natural and straightforward as having a bowel movement!” “Birth control is more dangerous than childbirth!” “Gestation actually heals the mother’s body!” “Babies don’t have to get in the way of being HOT!” “Remunerative labor, for women, is a sign of vanity!” Stating any skepticism or countervailing factual information about this narrative is coded as secretly “feminist” ingratitude and indoctrination. And there’s nothing worse than being a feminist, of course! It doesn’t matter that that word has become a floating signifier; it’s an extremely effective scarlet letter.

Take it from someone who’s done just about everything “right” according to the trad meme (aside from my failure to believe in it as presented, as panacea, for which I am regularly chastised): your fear is rational and natural. Yes, motherhood is beautiful in so many ways, but it’s also gritty and intense. I’ve nearly lost friends in childbirth. I’ve lost children in miscarriage. Plenty of women walk away from pregnancy with lifelong injuries, incontinence, or insulin resistance, by no fault of their own. You’ll never love anything so much as your own children, but every child is severely humbling in one way or another. Bottom line: the highs are high, the lows are low. There’s just no denying it. And by the way, both Abigail Adams and Jane Austen warned the cousins they loved against the dangers of childbirth, motherhood, and the intellectual and financial destitution that such paths can open up for particularly unfortunate or imprudent women.

I think the first step toward confronting the fear here might be to let go of the shame, borne of this implicit threat of alienation, about having it in the first place.

Elizabeth Grace Matthew

wrote an excellent piece this week reviewing Maternal Ambivalence: The Loving Moments and Bitter Truths of Motherhood by Margo Lowy, a psychotherapist and mother of three, who theorizes that obsessively focusing on negative feelings within or about motherhood in order to separate oneself from them contributes to further unhappiness by fostering “rigidity, disconnection, and humorlessness.” Drawing from case studies, Lowy believes that the better path, the path that would lead to “emotional and characterological strength” is actually created “by refusing to pathologize negative maternal feelings and accepting them instead as an informative and valuable—but by no means definitive or conclusive—part of the maternal condition.”

This observation conforms to my own experience. Pathologizing negative feelings is not actually an effective way of preventing them from dominating your life. There’s a subtle balance to be struck here. Dwelling excessively on emotions is clearly not the answer, but neither is dwelling on the idea or the identity of not having them at all. Instead of clinging to rigid extremes (suppression OR indulgence) we can simply acknowledge fear or sadness when they arise. We can take them to God in prayer: here’s a mess, I can’t clean this myself.

One of the most simple and insightful things a priest ever told me was, “You don’t have to pretend with God. He already knows.” God does not ask us to deny reality, only to trust Him within it. I think the impulse to over-research, to intellectualize, often stems from the desire to gain control by turning our fear into a puzzle we can solve independently, without the embarrassment of admitting we just aren’t equipped to manage on our own. In my own life, I’ve found that a more calm, non-combative posture toward fear—or anger, or depression—helps to neutralize it. Not rushing to avoid it both helps me to hear the important things it might be telling me and move along appropriately. Feelings can be parsed and pass more easily when they aren’t reflexively elevated to the level of emergency.

No longer bound by the question of “how do I eliminate fear?” the question becomes, “what do I want my life to be shaped by?” You already know the answer to that. You used the language of virtue and vocation, specifically, being “called to courage, trust, and action.” You also mentioned prudence.

Prudence, like any virtue, exists as a golden mean between two caricatures of itself, an insufficiency and an excess. St. Thomas Aquinas writes in the Summa, "Prudence is right reason in action; if it forsakes action for fear of risk, it ceases to be prudence." I’m not doubting your prudential reasoning for avoiding pregnancy while life was upended by travel. But if you're now stuck in a cycle of endless, actionless discernment, paralyzed by fear of suffering or failure, especially against the prospect of something you feel called to, Aquinas might urge you to examine whether your prudence has “exceeded” itself, becoming a perversion of the virtue in need of another one: fortitude, hope, or humility.

Grace precedes virtue. So, first, have grace for yourself. Pray for the supernatural grace of whatever virtue you need. Think of Mary—Mary who would suffer deeply in the context of motherhood—when the angel Gabriel came to her in the Annunciation. I don’t think she didn’t feel fear. Otherwise, Gabriel wouldn’t have had say, like Christ would go on to say over and over and over again, “do not be afraid.” She was about to be an unmarried, pregnant girl in a culture that routinely stoned women for adultery. And yet she didn’t have to eliminate the fear in order to say yes. She just needed to cooperate with the grace that was already dwelling within her. She drew closer to God, and put her fate in His hands, neither denying the possibility of pain nor indulging it. Fiat.

You’re not alone. Every woman who has ever given birth to a child did so from that same edge you’re standing on now. And finally, let me say: the fact that you are already considering the needs of children not yet born, and seeking to grow in virtue before they arrive, is the surest sign to me that you will be a wonderful mother.

Sincerely,

Helen