Birthcycle |

I had a flash of insight and inspiration this morning. For quite some time I’ve been wanting to start my own political blog (it’s what all the cool kids are doing, and I want to play).

I couldn’t figure out what I had to say, or what I wanted to talk about. This might seem obvious to those that know me, but it suddenly came to me this morning that what I really want to write about is my feminist perspective of the politics of pregnancy, birth, fertility and contraception.

This is a very important topic to me, and has been for most of my adult life. It’s something I think about all the time, and I’ve done my homework. Over the last seven years I’ve taken many courses and read many books. I’ve researched and navigated my way around conflicting studies and standards of practice.

I’ve attended both home and hospital births as a doula, and seriously researched the possiblity of moving into midwifery or becoming a traditional birth attendant. I’ve been a member of online unassisted/unhindered/free birthing communities since 2000.

In short, these are topics about which I have a great deal to say.

On the whole, in my reading of the feminist blogosphere, issues of reproduction unrelated to abortion tend to get rather short shrift as a blogging topic. Contraception sometimes gets a lot of attention, but there seems to be quite a lot of ignorance floating around out there too, with a lot of people painting things in a kind of black and white that I’m not sure really applies.

The personal is political. I am a woman who uses contraception, who eventually intends to conceive and bear one or more children, and I know many other women who will do all or some of those things as well.