The intervention of the pregnancy test, et al

After 13 years of devoting my life and work to women and babies, I have come to realise that even the most subtle of acts are an intervention of some degree, to physiological birth.

The program of distrusting your body, intuition and stealing your attention and presence starts long before you are pregnant. It infiltrates through stories form those around us and in media, and in the every day technologies and provisions of 'care' that are offered to us.

The pregnancy test is one of the most obvious symbolic opportunities to trade your sacred mystery, internal knowing and wisdom with a false sense of 'safety' and 'certainty'.

Pee on a stick, wait anxiously for a couple of minutes to be told wheher you are pregnant or not, meanwhile entertaining a host of emotional waves - excitement, fear, joy, maybe panic?

The longer term effects of the pregnancy test is something more insidious than just the artificially strong doses of intense emotions, including a solidified sense that we need external tools, devices and people to confirm what is going on in our own body. We, the person with the only lived experience of our body, looking to others for information on what is going on inside.

But why listen to your body if you can turn to technology for the answers?

By taking the quicker route and bypassing the more gradual process of observing infolding events in the body, we trade the building of an organic relationship with our changing body and our growing child inside us...essentially we reinforce the dampening of our listening powers.

What are you missing out on?

By jumping in to taking a pregnancy test, you are missing out on a valuable lesson and potential point of growth - unprecedented in any other life event of trust and internal knowing. A quiet secret developing in your womb that only you can feel and cannot show anyone, until many months in. This bright little light inside of you grows gradually and purposefully from a maybe, to a probably to definitely a baby.

Where else is attention and connection traded for false certainty and safety in the system?

The idea that midwives and doctors know your body and what's best for you and your baby better than you, is reinforced in every single antenatal appointment and every communication with licenced health professionals, most obviously in the way that they palpate, talk at you, coerce you into tests and procedures you might not want, and override your needs and desires in order to comply to guidelines essentially, to keep their job and pay their mortgage.

If you have taken a pregnancy test

I am focussing on the test as a symbol of the overall program that disempowers and separates. You can of course still tune in to your body and have a gente, powerful birth through making choices that connect you to yourself and the kind of birth *you want* and which nourishes you as the beautiful and capable mother that you are.