Some thoughts on what it means to be pregnant in destructive times
Anna Pigott (she/her) writes, researches, and teaches about the cultural roots of the climate and ecological crises. She is co-editor of the recent book, Art and Creativity in an Era of Ecocide (2023, Bloomsbury). She lives in Swansea and is on maternity leave with her second baby. This post was first published on Anna's Substack annapigott.substack.com . You can also find Anna on Instagram: @anna_pigott_
Content warning: contains details of pregnancy loss, please go gently if this is not for you.
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This weekend was my least favourite occasion in Swansea’s calendar; the Air Show. People say it’s good for morale, or community, or something. But I can’t see past the spewing of pointless carbon emissions, the glorification of war machines and military recruitment. All things that divide, divide, divide.
Exactly this time last year, as the Red Arrows swept in and out of the view of a large hospital window, my body spilled red blood into cardboard bedpan after cardboard pan, trying to release a pregnancy that hadn’t survived. Contractions interspersed with the sound of jet engines ripping through a cloudy summer sky.
Once the worst was over my partner, attempting to distract me from the tiny, huge thing that we’d lost, relayed the latest news from Ukraine; “They think that Putin could target the nuclear reactors”. And I remember thinking – as war machines raged for fun overhead, and lunatics threatened nuclear war for real elsewhere - “what the fuck. What the fuck am I doing even thinking about bringing new life into all this.”
Last year Ukraine. This year, still Ukraine – and also Gaza, and Sudan, and, and, and….
And yet. Here I am, my belly now huge with a new life almost ready to emerge. After several losses, pregnancy is an ephemeral, fragile thing that I almost don’t dare to write about for fear that it might disappear in a puff of smoke – a heart momentarily drawn in vapour trails. Magic.
I often think that to have continued along this path, I must be engaged in some kind of magical thinking of my own; pretending at ‘normal life’, sustained by the mirage of a future that even vaguely resembles the comfort and abundance that I had growing up. Climate catastrophes, the growing threats of war and disease, the fact that I hardly ever see butterflies anymore – for the most part, these are all filed away in a different part of my mind to the part that thinks about babies and their futures. I mostly, magically, avoid connecting the dots, although the inevitability of their connecting is buried deep within me.
These are personal words in political times, and I feel vulnerable sharing them, but the personal is political. Parenting is political. From plastics in placentas to air pollution poisoning foetuses, from babies under rubble in Gaza to toddlers squealing with delight at aircraft bombers showing off in safer skies, there is nothing in this world that is not connected.
Trying to mentally reconcile ‘baby-making’ with ‘world-ending’ is exhausting, but some words from the midwife and writer, Robina Khalid, recently helped me to see the beauty and significance in this wild journey of birthing in a seemingly broken world:
“Each of us [is] borne of the open fault lines on which those before us have tried to build lives. And the other song that birth sings, the song that I can hear (despite everything), is that each of us is also borne of the hope that those fissures might be healed.”
I suppose it was ever thus. Babies are born of hope that a better world is possible – at least, I know this one will be. I often return to Donna Haraway’s uncomfortable insistence that it is important to stay with the trouble. She’s right. Rather than escaping into magical thinking, a new life – all new lives (or simply, all lives!) – ought to be invitations, more than ever, to witness the ways in which worlds collide and connect through our brains and bodies, babies and bombs, to celebrate all that is still good, and to try to make things better.
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