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Katy Hays's avatar

I found out I was pregnant 6 weeks ago. As an adjunct professor, I knew I would need to work through labor, delivery, and post partum in order to keep paying our bills. I was extended 50% of my pay for 6 weeks as maternity leave. 50% pay would have been insufficient; I am our primary breadwinner. The sheer panic, terror, and incandescent rage I felt knowing I would not even get a week to care for my infant is hard to quantify. It made those early weeks of pregnancy the most stressful of my life. And I thought, almost daily, about a miscarriage or abortion for this very wanted pregnancy. Ultimately, nature (or the herculean amount of stress I was under) made the decision for me: I started miscarrying 12 days ago. And I was grateful.

The absolute lunacy that is the lack of paid family leave in America cannot be understated. Even being pregnant was wildly hard on my body. Moreover, it was something I could not grasp fully while we were simply "trying" to get pregnant, but something that became horrifying and desperation-making as soon as I *was* pregnant. Now, post miscarriage, I think we may choose to remain child free. The physical damage to the body, the lack of support for women, the lack of affordable child care, the collapsing climate all make motherhood one of the riskiest activities a woman can undertake today. And frankly, I'm not sure it's worth it. Unless, of course, you have the money. But really, people with money are the only people the American government wants having babies anyway.

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Alice Julier's avatar

All of the above -- and less coherently, i have been thinking a lot about cleaning (household cleaning mostly) and the tyranny of standards, especially as it's a way in which racial and gender hierarchies get reinforced. cleaning is never seen as care work. but it is. white women, especially progressives, are super cagey about talking about the support they can pay for, whereas it's taken-for-granted among men (mostly those who don't have women to do or negotiate this for them). likewise, i'm so impressed by my students (college grad and undergrad) who are pumped to talk about gender inequities and teach me phrases like "weaponized incompetence" and know so much and are less willing to put up with a lot, but then the women do a lot of care work, especially emotion labor, for men they know. the men "try" -- they're less likely to take up space in class than previous generations -- but they definitely are completely unaware of how much they expect their needs to be met in so many ways. when i don't call on them. when I spend less time on their paper. when I tell them their ideas need work. basically any time, I, an older woman, don't tell them they're amazing or fabulous for being "aware" of misogyny. and there's a way in which this all leads back to convenience -- I'm just not sure what it is, yet, but I hear a lot of men talking about being "inconvenienced," as if this is a benign or ordinary expectation.

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