not discomfort or apprehension – TERROR.

On May 12th we watched a video in my anatomy & physiology class. It was actually quite interesting: it was called The Womb and was made by National Geographic. Through a combination of very fancy video techniques and computer modeling, the video showed what fetal development was like from conception forward. It was directed by someone who had apparently just graduated from film school, though, because there was a lot of unnecessary artistic technique involved.

I was extremely unhappy, even before it began, about watching any video that ended in birth. I have a major problem with birth imagery; the scene in Alien when the alien bursts out of John Hurt’s stomach is one that, much as I normally love gore & guts in the movies, I cannot stand to watch. Birth imagery is frightening, disgusting, and deeply disturbing to me, in a way that no other movie gore can touch. Watching the real thing, I believe, would be far worse. I do not know where this psychology comes from, what caused me to feel this way; I only know that to keep myself from suffering a breakdown, I stay the hell away from birth imagery.

The video started, and I found the process of fertilization fascinating, the fact that out of so many millions and millions of sperm, there are only a few that can go the distance; that the cell divides so many dozens of times so quickly; that our stem cells have the capacity to become any tissue in the body – well, human bodies are miracles to me when they’re walking around and mature, and the beginning of one is even more marvelous. But then the zygote started lengthening out and looking like a tadpole, and I started feeling sick.

The weeks rolled on, and the baby got bigger, and I felt more and more unpleasant. I listened to the stages of development and what was happening to the fetus with interest, but I felt ill every time the fetus was actually shown. When it moved, I wanted to run out of the room. The mother’s belly was growing. I was feeling worse and worse. I made it just about through the second trimester, watching the clock move by millimeters, and then I couldn’t stand it any longer, class attendance points be damned, and I left, crying when I got to my car.

This was not an offensive video. It was well-made, interesting, and not anywhere near graphic. But the experience of watching it was excruciating for me. The notion that this creature was inside a woman, being nourished by what she ate, kicking the inside of her abdominal wall, just nauseated me. Even thinking about the purpose of the placenta (objectively, a fascinating organ) is horrible to me. I cannot and could not stand it.

The thing that made me cry was not how upset the video made me – which was significant, to be sure – but the idea that feeling this way made me a freak. Everyone knows that childbirth is awful, the most painful experience of a woman’s life, but the vast majority of women on the planet will go through it anyway. Many of them will be happy during pregnancy, and most of them will be happy to have the resulting child. How could I be thoroughly repelled by this entire experience – the very notion of having a child in my body – and still call myself a woman? I must be hopelessly cold-hearted and…just…not normal.

I had also thought this was something I’d outgrow. I have never in my life thought it would be fun to have kids, not even when I was a little girl and had dolls, not during my teens, not never, not nohow. When I learned about how babies were born, I thought sounded thoroughly gross, and as I grew older, those feelings didn’t exactly evolve into tender desire. I figured that if I still didn’t want children for all the other reasons I don’t want children by the time I was in my thirties, that wouldn’t be a big deal. But I’d seriously believed that my lifelong repulsion regarding pregnancy and birth would pass if I was exposed to the concepts more. Apparently not, judging by how upset I was that Wednesday.

The term for how I felt is tokophobia – a terror of pregnancy and childbirth. Although I knew that there’s a -phobia term for fear of just about everything on the planet, probably including fluffy bunnies, I was still amazed to discover on the internet that I am far from the only woman who feels this way. I’d assumed that there were probably women who discovered that childbirth really sucked, and were afraid of it after the fact, but I’ve never really believed that there were women like me, who felt utterly repulsed with no existing trauma, no prior bad experience.

To be continued.