RITA OLIVEIRA SAID: "I’m tired of hearing that pregnancy is not an illness.".

A lot of times when I announce that I’m pregnant, it’s the first thing I hear, even among my dear friends, unfortunately. This proclamation is more than a reminder or “advice.” In my understanding it’s a call to the established decades-old macho order. One could say that it’s part of the process of the removal of feminist empowerment in the act of generating a life and putting it in the world – it serves as a reminder and intervention of the State in the activities of midwives in the last century, even criminalizing these practices in the name of asepsis and modernity, to the point of introducing, catastrophically in some countries, industrialized milk advising to substitute this for mother’s milk. And obviously broaching the theme of cesarean births and pseudo-normal births. “Pregnancy is not an illness” gives me an idea that this phase of life shouldn’t be embraced as anything special, that we should continue to produce materially in the society and that we are not attentive to the changes that a pregnancy provokes and what it does to us. This idea is part of a violent process of expropriation, of silencing and coercion that women are exposed to. The care that society seems to encourage by stating this phrase doesn’t go past mere esthetics. In some cases we’re treated like breeding hens, as mere reproductive units, and terrible inversions happen in this way of thinking, as we hear it said that a dog is pregnant and that a woman is “carrying a litter,” that a donkey “gives light” [Br. idiom for pregnancy] but that a woman “gives a calf.”

“Pregnancy is not a disease” is an observation, an order that can be accompanied, nonetheless, with actions that dehumanize the pregnant woman, that’s to say, even above what was said above, not understanding that women in this phase of life need care, that they can’t ingest simply any type of products present in society, that they become vulnerable, that they leave their socially constructed role – that of one who takes care of others – and that they must, above all, also be taken care of in this phase. Society thrusts women into a solitary and violent experience at a moment when they should be supported to create new physically and emotionally healthy individuals while staying themselves healthy as well.

Because of this, “pregnancy is not a disease” is a disease, but not of pregnant woman but of an insensitive society, inhuman, perverse, macho, that tries to violently take away the humanity, citizenship, empowerment, dignity, etc. from all women.