What Pregnancy and Birth Taught Me About Womanhood and Humankind

Before I became pregnant, I understood, intellectually, that every person had grown inside a woman’s body. Of course, I knew that. We all do. 

But once I fell pregnant myself, it stopped being abstract. The truth landed in a completely different way.

Suddenly, everywhere I looked, I saw it. Every person on the train. Every child in the park. Every elderly person pushing their walker. Every cashier, every politician, every teacher, every artist, every difficult person, every wonderful one. 

Every one of them was grown inside a woman’s body, cell by cell, from scratch. (With a little help from a sperm, sure. But damn, she did the rest.)

Then they were carried. And then they were birthed. By her.

Her body did that. Her body is a miracle. 

When I really let that sink in, it changed the way I saw women forever.

Pregnancy and birth gave me a new understanding of the sheer physical power of women. Not in a glossy, romanticised sense. I mean the real thing. All those pregnancies. The tiredness, the discomfort, the swollen feet, the aching hips, and the heaviness of carrying a baby in your body. The way even turning over in bed can become a full-body effort by the end. Hands gripping hand rails to climb sets of stairs. 

All that labouring. All that labour.
Contractions. Pushing. Tears. C-sections. Epidurals, episiotomies, forceps. Breech, posterior, dilation, effacion. The way so much of it asks for strength, endurance, surrender, and resilience all at once. 

And women have been doing this, all over the world, for all of human history.

There was something almost overwhelming to me in that realisation. Humanity has always depended on the labour of women’s bodies. Not occasionally or just symbolically, literally every one of us came into the world that way. 

Every leader, every genius, every criminal, every inventor, every CEO, every person who has ever loved us or hurt us was grown by a woman first.

It has made me feel a deeper respect for women, and truthfully, at times, a deeper anger too. Because when you look at women through that lens, when you really consider what women’s bodies have carried and created, it becomes even harder to stomach the ways women are dismissed, disrespected, controlled, or denied dignity. 

Men who are cruel, who subject women to harsh treatment, who strip away our rights - we grew them too.

Our contribution is not minor or secondary; it is foundational.

And I do not mean to suggest that procreation is the only thing women offer to the world. 

Far from it. If you’ve followed my work, you will know that championing women’s creativity, intelligence, leadership, storytelling, emotional labour, and work is one of my greatest passions.

I would never want to reduce womanhood to motherhood, or motherhood to biology. We are more than cavemen. We are more than our uteruses. Uteri?

And yet, going through pregnancy, birth, and motherhood has made me feel something enormous about what women do. It has made me see the female body with more awe. More reverence. More humility.

Pregnancy and birth did not just teach me about babies. It taught me something about humanity itself. That every person begins in dependence. That every life starts with a woman carrying more than we can see from the outside. 

The world has always been built, quite literally, through the Herculean effort of women.

So from woman to woman, I say thank you. 

To women. I see you.