Pregnancy is Nothing But Fearmongering

A mom on Metafilter talks about how everyone thinks her pregnancy was their business:

You’ve never seen a pregnancy forbidden list, have you? Basically the only food that you’re allowed to eat is BROWN RICE. Everything else is going to kill you, or your fetus, in terrible ways and you can’t be trusted to make decisions about how safe your cheese storage is or how likely it is that your root vegetables harbor toxoplasmosis and LOOK YOU’RE NOT SCARED ENOUGH YET. Pregnancy is NOTHING BUT fearmongering, and the refusal to allow women to do their own risk/reward weighing — up to and including jailing them for refusing to comply with (sometimes questionably-supported) medical advice for the good of their fetuses — is sadly common in the United States. … There is literally nothing as infantalizing as being pregnant in the US, and there is absolutely no assumption that pregnant women can make appropriate decisions about their own health or families. NONE. Once you are pregnant you are presumed to be both stupid and irresponsible and adult choices are taken away from you.

From a discussion about the CDC’s warnings about alcohol use for women who are sexually active.


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