I Felt Terrified To Raise A Baby Girl In This World. Then, 5 Words From My OB-GYN Gave Me Hope.

Yahoo

09-07-2025

At 38 years old, after a breakup, a move and a series of dating app experiences that served only to provide my comedian friend with material for an entire year of stand-up shows, I decided to pursue single parenthood.
For me, motherhood had always been a dream, both in that it's been a lifelong desire and seemed as unattainable as most dreams do. Some of this stemmed from societal assumptions of parenthood; a two-parent household that is preceded by dates wildly more successful than any I'd ever been on, followed by marriage, and, even in this era of delayed pregnancy and scientific breakthroughs in assisted reproduction, the loud ticking of a biological clock.
And, more pressingly and personally: Did I deserve the responsibility, joys, and privileges of motherhood? A lifetime of often-crushing people-pleasing and imposter syndrome, coupled with the prospect of an administration that almost immediately began to roll back access to reproductive healthcare and instituted critical threats to human rights, plagued my first trimester even more than my newly fluctuating hormones.
Compared to so many others, I was lucky. It was an easy subway ride to the fertility clinic, and I snagged early morning appointments that barely interfered with work. I sent emails from the beautifully appointed waiting room of the Midtown office, and joked with the nurses who had the misfortune of taking my blood for the overwhelming battery of tests required for any fertility journey.
Sometimes, I walked the three miles home from the clinic, stopping for a toasted bagel with vegan cream cheese from my favorite bodega and handing out information on New York's Prop 1 ballot initiative and voter registration packets along the way.
And, though I hadn't dared to let myself believe it would, could work, the third pregnancy test flashed positive a month before the election. For a month, I carried this perfect, barely-real secret with me as I sat in work meetings lobbying for reproductive medicine access, as I canvassed and phone-banked for the full slate of Democratic candidates, as I hoped for personal and national health and success, as I tried to suppress the fears that prevented me from fully celebrating, from hoping, from buying maternity clothing or Harris-Waltz merch.
And then. Well, you know most of what happened next. Many of us mourned as a nation while others, unfettered by the president's fear-mongering, themselves spread a shocking amount of xenophobia, misogyny and racism.
And on a personal level, I stayed at home rather than go on a work trip to Florida, which had just instituted a six-week abortion ban under Ron DeSantis' campaigns of intimidation and misinformation. At six weeks pregnant, I knew that the odds of early miscarriage were still high, and that access to care would mean a now-illegal abortion.
Those weeks, I woke up, worked, and went to bed nauseous from pregnancy ― and from my terror for my immigrant family and friends, seeing the gleefully entitled hostility among the anti-abortion protestors at the clinic where I had volunteered for years, and now, increasingly aware of my precarious privilege as a pregnant person in New York, where, at the very least, access to and protections for abortion were protected.
And I cried, curled up around the vague idea of this early pregnancy, wondering what I had done and what it would mean to bring a human into this country and world.
At my 12-week appointment, when I had just been told I was having a girl and my phone was blowing up with a terrifying series of executive orders and nominations, I headed to my second OB-GYN appointment swamped by all of that fear, guilt, and the all-encompassing nausea of the wildly misnamed 'morning sickness.'
Stripped to the waist and trying to pretend that I recognized and was moved by the flickering blob of static on the ultrasound screen, I expressed the easiest of my worries, that I wasn't providing my growing fetus with enough (or any) nutrients, as the only thing I was able to keep down was depressingly dry toast and the occasional cup of tea.
As she wiped the goo from the ultrasound wand, my OB-GYN said five words that have since become a mantra and a sea change: 'Don't worry; she'll take what she needs.'
She left the room as I lay on the table, absorbing the surprising power of that sentence. She'll take what she needs: a reassurance, but also a wish, that this baby girl, born into a terrifying nightmare of government-sanctioned misogyny, dehumanization of immigrants and minorities, cuts to social services, attacks on trans people, will somehow both recognize and demand her rights. Born to a parent who has always struggled with naming her needs, let alone taking what she needs, this being will nevertheless ensure that her own needs are met, even in her earliest moments in utero.
And so she has; as the terror of this administration has grown, systematically and purposefully, in tandem alongside the joys and thrills of pregnancy, she has siphoned the iron from my blood to aid in her own development, shoved my internal organs into disarray to make space for her growing body, sent me to the pharmacy for Unisom, ginger tea, Tums, and a dizzying array of vitamins as she has jutted and carved her way into my digestive, endocrine, cardiac, other systems I never paid attention to until she claimed them for her own.
And I have delighted in each of these uncomfortable, incredible reminders that my baby girl is, even now, asserting herself.
'She'll take what she needs' has echoed in my mind as a hope and a promise as my due date approaches — you'll take what you need, and I'll learn from you. I rub my belly, jabbed now with elbows and heels and other sharp little body parts demanding room and attention, and make my wish: You'll tell me what you need, and I will keep fighting to make it available for you. We'll take what we need, and we'll make sure that others can, too.
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