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The Need For Pregnancy: Not So Feminine

The Need For Pregnancy: Not So Feminine

Pregnancy and giving birth is an extremely personal and sacred experience that only women are able to fully take part in. A woman has the ability to carry a fetus inside her, her body nurturing and nourishing the tiny being for nine months until it is fully-grown and ready to enter the world. The ability to be able to create and bring life into this world is a powerful thing many women choose to take part in. That is not to say that those women who make the decision not to have children are not empowered beings. Just being able to choose whether or not to have children is powerful in itself. Why is it then that, a process that relies so heavily on women to take place, which needs (or should need) a women’s consent to even begin, is so detached from the female species? Men are continually being given more and more power in regards to pregnancy and the birthing process, a process which does not involve his body, but the woman’s. Not only is a woman’s control over her pregnancy and birthing being given to men, but in some references the woman is taken completely out of the equation Even the definitions “to give birth” (cause to be born) and “pregnancy” (the period during which one is pregnant) are devoid of woman (dictionary.com).
According to Aristotle, women are “nothing more than a receptacle for man’s distinctive seed.” Therefore, it is the woman’s position in life to bear children. So why then is the entire process, all the main aspects of pregnancy – whether one actually wants to have kids or not, where to deliver the baby, and in what method the baby should be delivered – all rules that have been determined by males? Many women decide to have children because they feel it will give them some meaning in life, because they have been conditioned to believe that their purpose in life is to have children and that is all. Martin Luther enforced this idea when he once said, "If a woman grows weary and, at last, dies from...