It is hard indeed, especially when your local/personal circles are not talking about actually using NFP to avoid or postpone pregnancy. People also will presume, if you have several kids, that you don't use NFP/don't use it to avoid/space pregnancies, and so they will expect you to keep having babies no matter what. And then nobody knows who they can talk to who won't judge them if they say "I think it would be best for us to avoid pregnancy right now..."
In my opinion, NFP looks more appealing to people outside the NFP fold when it is honest about the challenges of pregnancy and family life. NFP actually acknowledges the fittingness of prudence and stewardship as part of discernment about when to deliberately conceive a child. Many people who contracept see contraception as the means to be good stewards and be prudent. NFP rejects contraception as the means but still honors the need for prudence.
I think if people outside of the NFP world understood that NFP makes room for prudence in a moral way (as opposed to an immoral, contraceptive way) they would be more open to it. Right now, I think most non-Catholics and non-orthodox Catholics think Catholic theology about fertility does not acknowledge that there are good reasons to avoid a pregnancy. But it does!!
So maybe it's a good thing if we can say publicly, "I'm so thankful that NFP has helped me avoid another HG pregnancy/C-section right now. Praise God!" (Especially because behind that is also the reality that if God gave you another child anyway, you would not reject that gift.)
Let's push back together against all this nonsense about putting up a front of perfection for other people!
Just wanted to pop in on this beautiful thread and say that you are NOT SELFISH -- grave reasons come in all shapes and sizes, and you don't need to be the PR team for NFP. The sacrifices you are making do build up your marriage and your family and the Church -- even if we have a hard time talking about this in a way that is encouraging to each other. Carry on ❤️
It’s been awhile since I read it, but I thought Simcha Fisher’s short book A Sinner’s Guide to NFP was really helpful, both validating and elucidating, in understanding the role of NFP for me and how discernment can look different for different people. Might be worth a look, for a boost in morale if nothing else!
Honestly, I would just recommend a close (re)reading of Humanae Vitae! The language in there is very strong about responsible parenthood. Also, it notes that "physical, economic, psychological and social conditions" may play into the decision to avoid or delay pregnancy. Discerning these is left up to the couple. There is no restriction that pregnancy may only be avoided if the mother is, for example, in danger of death.
This should be very encouraging, I hope. The idea that *only* the very, VERY gravest circumstances justify delaying pregnancy is an extra burden placed on couples by the discernment of others, not by Church teaching itself.
Honestly, NFP is hard and so most people practicing it are not being selfish. It is already a sacrifice to practice NFP! So I think we should start from a place of modest confidence in our prayerful discernment about family size in the context of NFP, and not presume that use of NFP to avoid is *probably* sinful, as I think some people do presume.
My husband showed me this. It is SO encouraging to hear. I still shudder when I think about the first few months of baby girl's pregnancy and to hear there may be a cure makes me so happy for all first time moms who may get HG!!!
I recently heard about this, and had the same reaction as you! I so severely ill during my pregnancy...and the worst was when I had other people tell me there was no way I could be that sick...I would try to explain but it was hopeless...it was literally all day sickness and had just a few things I could stoamch. it was awful. I hate that you dealt with it too, and pray for all of the women out there dealing this this they have relief soon.
I am so sorry that you have dealt with this. Solidarity!
I think sometimes it's hard for people to grasp what this is like and how serious it is because they think it's like the regular morning sickness that they or their wives experienced, but just a little worse. They think you're morally weaker than other women rather than what is actually true: that you have a more serious condition than other women.
Regular morning sickness is bad enough, for goodness sake! But HG is really on a whole other level...
Kind of like people doubting clinical depression because they think it's just being sad...only a little sadder. Or ADHD because they think it's just like being antsy...only a little antsier.
Yess what a perfect way to relate it to those other conditions! I honestly put that same perception on myself, that I was weaker and felt so different from everyone else because of my expereince -- with the physical illness combined with the high risk pregnancy situation, it took a toll mentally on me, one which I still carry with me, so I understand the PTSD some women may expereince from the HG as well. Though it makes me sad we both had this experience, I am happy to connect on this topic and have someone all of these years later truly understand the impact it has on women.
I have done the very same thing. You see other women still functioning while pregnant and you don't understand that they just are not experiencing what you are experiencing.
I have a great PCP and a great OBGYN now who both completely understand how serious HG is and that it needs treatment. But I have had some docs in the past who only underscore the "you are just being silly/weak" thing. I've also have friends see me and say things like "you don't look sick!" Well, sorry I don't look as sick as I feel!
I think there's some potential that this might help with "regular" morning sickness, too, which can be bad enough!! I hate that because it's "normal" it's just considered perfectly fine.
Yes! I feel pulled in different directions when talking about my experience of pregnancy. No one wants to hear about how hard it is, and I want to be careful not to imply that I don't love my kids (I do! It's normal to do difficult things for people that you love! The fact that it's difficult doesn't mean you love them less!). But the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and if we all suffer in silence then nobody's going to be aware that it's an issue. In Catholic circles, at least the ones I've been in, it sometimes seems like you're not allowed to be public about the difficulties of pregnancy -- we all need to be glowing all the time, and thrilled, and if you're limiting family size or nervous about pregnancy because pregnancy is miserable, then shame on you for not glowing more! St. Paul says we were bought with a price, and of course he was talking about Christ, but we mothers -- and I think especially mothers who have difficult pregnancies and deliveries -- know that in a very powerful way. We know the price *we* paid to bring our children into the world, and we know that our children are *worth* that price. I think this is where the motherly protectiveness comes from. We have invested *so much* in our children's existence and we don't want it to be a sunk cost. I believe this is how God feels about us, too. (I took at St. Paul class last semester and it was also the anniversary of a very scary L&D that I experienced, so all this was on my mind.)
I'm blown away by this insight, that we know the price *and* we know it is worth it.
Wow.
I would love to read an essay by you about this, Mary.
Also: if we had our sisters and close friends and neighbors with whom to commiserate over the hard parts, then perhaps we wouldn't feel the need to talk about the hard parts publicly. But we're atomized, so maybe we can't talk to close people about this, and maybe they wouldn't know enough as a small group about these things anyways, necessarily, because we've lost the collective memory in this area, and we're having fewer and fewer children and less and less experience with all of this. So if it's not part of the public conversation, it's not part of the conversation at all -- because private and semi-public conversation and fellowship is waning, and waning fast.
Yeah, I don't know! I did have lots of private conversations with more experienced moms as I tried to figure out how to handle my first trimesters, and there was lots of advice and commiseration and prayer. But none of that private conversation is going to put fire in the belly of researchers to figure out how to improve things. We need the researchers and research funders to know that women are suffering a lot and that this suffering matters enough to do some research on how to alleviate it.
Yes, that's a good point. Something like HG, for example, can't be solved by woman-to-woman advice alone. We need research and medicine for it, and to get that, we need Kate Middleton's HG appearing in the papers. And other such public things.
I so often feel that the only acceptable extremes are: "Pregnancy was so difficult that we took permanent measures, I can't do that again" or "I am so so blessed to have seventeen children" (I exaggerate for effect). I think the reality of it being a tenuous battle between love, human desire for autonomy, the great joys and the great sorrows to be much more accurate. I think many mothers of large families feel the need to defend the choice, and thus are afraid if they voice how difficult it is they will be chastised for being irresponsible and continuing to have children (this especially in conservative evangelical circles where there isn't a strict teaching and birth control can be seen as "responsible"). Which, like you say, is so unlike the model we're given. Christ counted the cost, we can too. But this also doesn't mean we just put on blinders as to the cost and real wear that pregnancy, birth and mothering encompass. Maternal depletion -- from a nutritional standpoint, emotional etc... is so real. Could we have conversations about how difficult it is in ORDER to support more mothers being able to embrace life? It's this zero sum, no win thing on either side so often.
In order to support mothers embracing life...yes. Because mothers already know it is hard, and if we pretend it is not, that only makes other mothers feel more hopeless.
I know several friends who sadly only had two babies because the morning sickness was so terrible each time. A cure for HG sounds very attractive and interesting! One would have to carefully weigh individual pros and cons, long-term safety data, side effects for a new product. Informed consent is sometimes neglected in enthusiasm for a saviour.
Fortunately, we already have some drugs that deal with this particular hormone, and one of them is commonly used both to increase chances of becoming pregnant and to treat gestational diabetes that is not responsive to dietary changes. So we're not starting from square one in terms of knowledge about the hormone and about how drugs that deal with it may affect pregnant women and women seeking to become pregnant.
Taking any drug in pregnancy feels very risky, but many (most?) HG mothers are at serious risk without treatment, and the medications that they are already taking are often (excluding Diclegis) Class B, C, or worse. The alternative to not treating it, even with risk involved, is not a good one in most cases of HG, from what I know of the condition.
The drug Zofran is a good example of what I see as a very acceptable risk in exchange for reduction of vomiting and thus possibly avoiding dehydration and hospitalization. A few years back, it was found that Zofran in the first trimester (especially before 8 weeks) increases the risk of a heart defect in fetuses. Many doctors immediately stopped prescribing Zofran to their pregnant patients.
Yet the increased risk was very low, only about 1-2%, if I'm remembering correctly. The risk of untreated HG is much higher -- it *frequently* leads to hospitalization, loss of income, PTSD, etc.
So I think that with HG, it may be even more important to recognize that the untreated or undertreated condition itself is very often the greatest source of risk, not the treatments.
Dixie, do you follow Emily Oster on Parentdata? If not, you should. She's an economist who wades t hrough all the data and how to weigh risks of everything. She'll take any mom-related study and suss through the data very similar to how you're doing here.
I’m so thankful for this breakthrough. I had morning sickness on the worse end of “normal,” and yet I know it barely scratched the surface of what so many women experience. I pray the solutions will come quickly and effectively, and that doctors will prescribe them readily, taking seriously the risks that untreated HG present.
Me, too! I think it's absolutely fascinating, too, and am excited to see what seems to be the best (or maybe there will be more than one) way to use this knowledge in treatment.
I saw this! I'm so glad you're writing about it too. I really hope this brings some measure of relief to HG sufferers. I had HG with my first pregnancy, which overlapped with Princess Kate's first pregnancy. She was diagnosed a couple weeks into my pregnancy and so that's how I knew my morning sickness wasn't normal. Her HG prompted me to talk to my midwives about it. For months I couldn't eat hardly anything (weirdly, mango lassi and hot dogs were ok?? Nothing else would stay down.) and I was unable to drink flat/still water for the entire pregnancy. I drank coconut water and took little sips of fizzy water.
I lost over 20 lbs (I had about that extra to spare going into the pregnancy) so my weight at time of delivery was two pounds more than my pre-pregnancy weight.
I'm eternally grateful that my later pregnancies were normal all-day queasiness with only the occasional vomiting, instead of HG. The HG + PPA/D made us seriously question having more than one child. In fact, we didn't for several years. The trauma was too much. I'm grateful we did (eventually) have more children (my first pregnancy/post-partum was my worst), but I hold other mommas who endured trauma and decided to stop with one in the highest regard.
Postpartum and antenatal mood disorders are very common after HG. I'm glad you took the whole thing seriously and waited when you discerned that that was important. But it's a grief to have to do that...I'm sorry.
I think that Princess Kate's public acknowledgment of the condition went a long way towards awareness! I am so happy that you were able to get help because of those news stories!
Yes! I'm so sorry she had to endure it for all her pregnancies but I'm glad the attention helped so many other women. It reminds me of the publicity surrounding Chrissy Teigan's miscarriage and how that opened the door to so many women being able to talk about their miscarriages without shame.
Our society needs better methods for processing grief and acknowledging/supporting others going through grief instead of just ignoring it. Unresolved grief, especially the unseen kind is cavernous and eats at our souls. I would love churches (of all stripes) to take the lead on this! After all, our Savior was one who experienced great suffering and grief, (and not just on the cross).
My friend Julie pointed out something really important to me the other day; that you can even receive criticism for accepting help from your mom. If it's wrong to even let your mom help you (you're "burdening" her), where are we supposed to turn for support in times of trouble like miscarriage or HG or whatever?
What I realized was that our society thinks that the only respectable help to get is *paid help.* So it's fine if you *pay* a housecleaner to clean your house when you have HG, but you're asking too much if you wish your neighbors or church fellows would set up a schedule of volunteers for a cleaning twice a month.
I am still mulling this over and I am really intrigued by it.
The solutions that are suggested online to needed help are "buy help, it's worth it," neglecting the reality that many people cannot afford to buy help. But since it is possible and encouraged in our world to buy help, we let ourselves off the hook from offering volunteer social/community help.
I wonder if this is part of the disdain that is sometimes directed toward homemakers. The "responsible" thing is to put your talents and skills toward the GDP and to pay someone else to do the caregiving your children and home require. Neglecting the GDP by putting your skills toward unpaid caregiving is vaguely irresponsible, a "waste" of work that could be put toward creating income.
True. And I've noticed that society tends to praise the people who step in to help the soon-to-be and new-moms, as though they are doing something heroic and out of the ordinary. This legitimizes the sense that women are weak if we somehow can't muscle through the post-partum stage on our own.
Investing in people is never a waste, but I get what it being said about inefficiencies. Yet, market forces being what they are, unless you need specialized care for a child, isn't it more efficient for mothers/fathers to care for their own children? (I'm speaking in economic terms, but I personally actually don't like utilitarian arguments for parenthood. I feel like it undermines the intrinsic good and mystery of parenting.)
Ooh. I just have to piggy back here because my husband and I have been having many conversations about what makes it so difficult to find community. We have observed that most people (especially in our area) prefer to pay for help vs. rely on their neighbors or friends, and then if you happen to not be able to pay for help, it presents this awkward bind of lopsided relationships because people can be so weird about accepting and reciprocating (myself included! but an area I'm actively seeking to grow in). But the piece here I find interesting is this idea of not paying for work being irresponsible! I think this is a piece of it I hadn't thought about -- our culture's hard bent towards only legitimizing work as worthwhile if you are paid. Even to the point that my husband, who repairs things for a living, is sometimes stuck in this weird bind where people want to hire him to do work, where he'd prefer to offer to help (like with folks from church). But they won't ask him for help... And on the one hand I appreciate the consideration of not taking advantage of people, because that happens too. But the whole thing makes it really hard to just give and receive help in a way that is not weird!
Lack of reciprocation is such a big problem. It's just very uncomfortable to accept help from people who refuse to accept *your* help in turn. So it only makes it harder to ask for and accept help!!
The "irresponsible" idea is a very new one to me but I think we may be onto something with it. I wonder if there is a classist element related to the old-fashioned sense of not wanting to accept charity. And yet people did used to accept neighborliness and distinguish between the two. Is there somehow a sense though that paying for help is still being independent and taking care of yourself, but asking for/receiving unpaid help is failing to take care of yourself, so is shameful? Like being on the dole?
I wonder if part of it has to do with a loss of skills that are more common -- probably most people used to have common hands on skills and could help with agriculture or house fixing type things. Many people in our generation don’t have those skills so maybe part of it is that they feel less able to reciprocate and we’re not very creative in envisioning how different giftings can help in a variety of ways. People don’t want to accept something they don’t feel capable of repaying? 🤷♀️
To ride this tangent, that last part is interesting. I've gathered from many folks (including an actual conversation with a family member) that many in the Boomer generation especially think and plan this way about their own elder care: That saving up to pay your own way through any last stages of your life is morally superior than burdening your family with the task.
(I mean, I get it and I've seen the toll it takes in actual life, so there can certainly be some balance here..... but the whole "I would never make them care for me" attitude is frankly a little sad.)
I’ve thought about trying to set up a chore-sharing thing here in town, where anyone (for any reason! looking at my huge pile of laundry to be folded lol) can sign up and request x number of friends to come by, and people can just set aside maybe one day a month to do whatever needs to be done that day. There are too many logistics for me to be confident in it yet but the idea of everyone pitching in to help friends out is super appealing. I’d rather do friends’ chores than my own lol.
Did you read Leah Libresco Sargeant’s piece (I think it was her) on the value of little imbalances in neighborly relationships? Like, cultures where paying someone back in exact change is considered rude because it sends the message that you don’t want to be indebted to them (or vice versa) and thus don’t want to be friends with them? I think about it a lot.
Oh, goodness. No, I haven't read that. Do you think you could dig up the link? That sounds like something I would really love to read.
Isn't working together just so nice? There's so much inertia against these things that might well lighten our loads and our days...so many things that I write "wow, this would be great" but then can't seem to get going. Good for you for starting it up! I am excited to hear how it goes.
We've been talking with some friends in our area about setting that sort of thing up as well - either a weekend big home project planning chart, or a weekday cleaning circuit (while the children are locked out- I mean play outside)
So I am once again proposing that y'all uproot your lives and just come live with us 😂
If you haven’t read Gilbert Meilaender’s piece from 2010, “I want to burden my loved ones,” you should. He’s discussing end-of-life decisions and care, which is connected to this discussion.
I think the individualistic water we swim in has muddied (sorry--couldn’t help it :)) our understanding of what families are for and, essentially, what love is. We struggle to give and to receive support because we have internalized an unrealistic expectation of independence in ourselves, a kind of Horatio Alger on steroids, doing life ourselves or with one other person (see The All-or-Nothing Marriage by Eli Finkel for a thorough history of the short but powerful culmination of romantic marriage post-WWII with the “pinnacle” of the nuclear family, then swiftly followed by the destruction of marriage and family). So we can’t reconcile this ideal with the reality of dependency that we’re in for most of our lives (see Louise Perry’s piece on that--thanks, Haley B. for that mention!). Now, we’re relearning that we are dependent and how we are to be dependent on each other. Extricating ourselves from our pride is challenging enough. We also are trying to rebuild communities of loving dependence at the same time--and really, relearning how to love again.
I have a book recommendation on this - Arlie Hochschild’s The Outsourced Self is all about this trend towards paying others for things we would have once done ourselves with the help of a supportive community - a sort of enclosure of the commons of private life. Because of course, as you point out, when the preference is for paid help the GDP goes up, and also some actual middleman makes money. The process is accelerated by our tendency to prefer “expert” or “professional” help to “amateur” help, which then leads to a vicious cycle of deskilling like Annelise mentioned downthread. It's been at least ten years since I read the book, but it really has stuck with me and influenced some life choices we've made in the interim (and some we've tried to make that didn't work out lol)
Ha, hm, well, I think overall I would say that our attempts to share more of the work and general activities of daily life with friends and family have not been terribly successful. The things that have worked have been more one-off type activities - co-hosting a party once, doing one big annual canning project together, swapping some babysitting now and then. And, don't get me wrong, those have been great! But attempts at more regular sorts of living-life-together that my younger, more idealistic self thought we might be able to develop have not panned out - things like cooking together regularly for our families with a friend who lives a few minutes away, some degree of joint homeschooling, even just regularly spending time with friends more often than after Mass every week.
I was hospitalized twice for HG with my twin pregnancy. It was miserable 😖 So excited to hear this news! A little sad though that it wasn’t discovered four years ago 😂
I can't relate in the ordinary way - my pregnancy sickness is bad, but not unbearable - but I have a severely irritable uterus and I immediately recognize the attitude of "wow, you're (I'm) weak/overreacting and possibly not cut out for this pregnancy thing". So many afternoons wasted getting checked for preterm labor. I love babies, but I'm struggling to get excited about asking God for another because of how debilitating the constant contractions were. THAT part I understand.
Oh my gosh! I had weeks and weeks of prodromal labor with my first three. It was really draining and limiting both physically and emotionally, and it sounds like you experienced much worse contractions etc. than I did!
It was so bizarre when I didn't have any prodromal labor with my fourth baby. I wish I knew why that pregnancy was free of it, so that I could tell you!!
Oh gosh, you really got it both ways there! I'm sorry you had to deal with that especially after HG.
I will hold out hope for my potential fourth! It's been getting progressively worse and starting earlier with each. Maybe this time won't be so bad, though.
Sometimes you get a surprise for the better with a later pregnancy. You never know. I was shocked! I think chiropractic care throughout the pregnancy may have helped with this some. But I really don't know.
I was an HG mom! ER visits, huge weight loss during pregnancy, all of it. It carried on until just partway through the last trimester, and it took me a year after birth to regain my strength. My God, it was awful.
I was for years embarrassed to admit that for some weeks in early pregnancy, I imbibed nothing but Coca Cola and a few tortilla chips. They were the only things I could—sometimes—keep down. Water was impossible. Vegetables made me vomit at the sight of them. I remember looking at a zucchini in the fridge one day and running to the toilet. We had a garden and I couldn’t even pick the tomatoes because the smell of them made me sick. Bread and crackers came right back up. I spent most of my time locked in a bedroom away from the smells of the kitchen—or lying on the bathroom floor.
I am so glad there is hope on the horizon for other women. The HG, plus my age, played a big role in my decision not to have more children. If I weren’t an HG sufferer, I would almost certainly have chosen to increase my family size. 💙
I'm so sorry you experienced this. Discerning that it would be irresponsible to seek further pregnancies is such a grief, but I completely understand this prudential decision.
I can really relate to what you are saying here about food (and about strength -- at least a year to recover, for sure). I couldn't eat pasta in my last pregnancy because it *smelled like water.* And I remember one time throwing up just from seeing my husband down the hallway because seeing him reminded me that sometimes he eats garlic and then smells like garlic (only to my super-sensitive HG nose!).
I pray there will be better treatment or a cure by the time our children marry!
I haven't experienced HG, but the constant low-grade-and-sometimes-miserable nausea for a few first trimester weeks was enough for me to realize HG was worse.
Having HG has given me a lot of empathy for women who "just" have "constant low-grade-and-sometimes-miserable nausea" or whatever other form of "regular" morning sickness they may have. The suffering is significant for many women, even when it isn't at HG level!
It's really interesting to hear about well-known people who have (or may have) suffered from things like this. Others have brought up Kate Middleton; it's so helpful to have someone known be open about this condition.
Man. I have such respect for women who deal with HG. I would say my morning sickness is perhaps worse than average, but the combination of nausea and zero wiggle room in my diet is awful. And then with our third I had gallbladder attacks that made it impossible to eat much... after that pregnancy a friend expressed surprise we’d have more because I had been so sick and I almost cried with relief bc someone saw and validated how awful I felt. I just think that people severely underestimate the emotional toll of something that you and baby need for your actual survival becoming a source of severe trauma. It’s not just a physical thing -- people are really emotionally battered from it.
I'd add that there are many ways (among which HG is one of the worst, but not one of the only!) in which pregnancy can require serious sacrifice on the part of a mother, including what you describe experiencing. But there's also varicose veins, pelvic girdle pain, sciatica, miscarriage, low progesterone (which means taking progesterone shots, so fun), placenta previa, and and and. Then there's birth. And breastfeeding. Etc. It is a gift and a joy to be a mother; but really, it can require radical self-sacrifice of us.
The fact that such self-sacrifice is to some degree normal or to be expected does not lessen its pain or harm or worthiness.
There's a balance between accepting God's pruning through this self-sacrifice and making sure you are stewarding the body and heart and energies God gave you well. I can't claim to have found that balance. So we can both be grateful and willing to suffer AND seek to relieve what suffering we can.
A dear friend has HG pregnancies -- she is expecting her fourth. She is without a doubt one of the bravest people I know. She really does approach the situation with humor, but it's caused so much suffering in her life. I'll be sharing the article with her for sure! Glad to hear that more pointed research is being done in this area ❤️
God bless her, and please tell her I will pray for her! You can do it, sister! And if she needs a cheerleader or someone to complain to, you have my e-mail address, Meredith...
Through four pregnancies I never got the HG diagnosis but the morning sickness and vomiting and exhaustion were absolutely devastating. When I am pregnant, all I can do is be pregnant. With the most recent baby it was probably easiest because the other kids were big enough that I could pop a Zofran, teach the bare minimum, then leave the nine-year-old to make lunch and put on Magic School Bus while I crawled to bed. I think Catholic circles sometimes romanticize pregnancy as a tremendous blessing (it is! It is!) but it can simultaneously be the best and worst thing ever to happen to a person. I’ve thought a lot about this, mostly while lying, nauseous and exhausted, in bed--can you tell? Haha.
I understand this completely! Pregnancy is an amazing gift, but it can also be extremely difficult, which is an important consideration for families discerning when to have more children. I've realized with my own pregnancies - both without an HG diagnosis but also very debilitating until the nausea subsides - that not all families have to discern in the same way. Some couples are thinking primarily about when it works to add another child - when can we say yes to a new baby nine months from now? When we were discussing trying for a second baby and third baby, our focus was the morning sickness, and when would we be in a stage of life where we could handle me being basically out of commission.
Right. It's the same with us. We sure would love to have more kiddoes. It is a sacrifice.
(But who knows? Maybe we will have more! You never know.)
I think its so wise that in the Catholic teaching the specifics of this discernment are left to the couple. Every situation is different. Avoiding pregnancy shouldn't be a requirement or even the default, but neither should we feel tortured by scrupulosity over discerning to avoid.
We can start with good general principles of generosity and prudence and go from there!
It is hard indeed, especially when your local/personal circles are not talking about actually using NFP to avoid or postpone pregnancy. People also will presume, if you have several kids, that you don't use NFP/don't use it to avoid/space pregnancies, and so they will expect you to keep having babies no matter what. And then nobody knows who they can talk to who won't judge them if they say "I think it would be best for us to avoid pregnancy right now..."
In my opinion, NFP looks more appealing to people outside the NFP fold when it is honest about the challenges of pregnancy and family life. NFP actually acknowledges the fittingness of prudence and stewardship as part of discernment about when to deliberately conceive a child. Many people who contracept see contraception as the means to be good stewards and be prudent. NFP rejects contraception as the means but still honors the need for prudence.
I think if people outside of the NFP world understood that NFP makes room for prudence in a moral way (as opposed to an immoral, contraceptive way) they would be more open to it. Right now, I think most non-Catholics and non-orthodox Catholics think Catholic theology about fertility does not acknowledge that there are good reasons to avoid a pregnancy. But it does!!
So maybe it's a good thing if we can say publicly, "I'm so thankful that NFP has helped me avoid another HG pregnancy/C-section right now. Praise God!" (Especially because behind that is also the reality that if God gave you another child anyway, you would not reject that gift.)
Let's push back together against all this nonsense about putting up a front of perfection for other people!
Just wanted to pop in on this beautiful thread and say that you are NOT SELFISH -- grave reasons come in all shapes and sizes, and you don't need to be the PR team for NFP. The sacrifices you are making do build up your marriage and your family and the Church -- even if we have a hard time talking about this in a way that is encouraging to each other. Carry on ❤️
Hear, hear!!
It’s been awhile since I read it, but I thought Simcha Fisher’s short book A Sinner’s Guide to NFP was really helpful, both validating and elucidating, in understanding the role of NFP for me and how discernment can look different for different people. Might be worth a look, for a boost in morale if nothing else!
Honestly, I would just recommend a close (re)reading of Humanae Vitae! The language in there is very strong about responsible parenthood. Also, it notes that "physical, economic, psychological and social conditions" may play into the decision to avoid or delay pregnancy. Discerning these is left up to the couple. There is no restriction that pregnancy may only be avoided if the mother is, for example, in danger of death.
This should be very encouraging, I hope. The idea that *only* the very, VERY gravest circumstances justify delaying pregnancy is an extra burden placed on couples by the discernment of others, not by Church teaching itself.
Honestly, NFP is hard and so most people practicing it are not being selfish. It is already a sacrifice to practice NFP! So I think we should start from a place of modest confidence in our prayerful discernment about family size in the context of NFP, and not presume that use of NFP to avoid is *probably* sinful, as I think some people do presume.
My husband showed me this. It is SO encouraging to hear. I still shudder when I think about the first few months of baby girl's pregnancy and to hear there may be a cure makes me so happy for all first time moms who may get HG!!!
I am *so* relieved to think that my daughters are increasingly unlikely to experience full-blown HG. I know you understand!
I recently heard about this, and had the same reaction as you! I so severely ill during my pregnancy...and the worst was when I had other people tell me there was no way I could be that sick...I would try to explain but it was hopeless...it was literally all day sickness and had just a few things I could stoamch. it was awful. I hate that you dealt with it too, and pray for all of the women out there dealing this this they have relief soon.
I am so sorry that you have dealt with this. Solidarity!
I think sometimes it's hard for people to grasp what this is like and how serious it is because they think it's like the regular morning sickness that they or their wives experienced, but just a little worse. They think you're morally weaker than other women rather than what is actually true: that you have a more serious condition than other women.
Regular morning sickness is bad enough, for goodness sake! But HG is really on a whole other level...
Kind of like people doubting clinical depression because they think it's just being sad...only a little sadder. Or ADHD because they think it's just like being antsy...only a little antsier.
Yess what a perfect way to relate it to those other conditions! I honestly put that same perception on myself, that I was weaker and felt so different from everyone else because of my expereince -- with the physical illness combined with the high risk pregnancy situation, it took a toll mentally on me, one which I still carry with me, so I understand the PTSD some women may expereince from the HG as well. Though it makes me sad we both had this experience, I am happy to connect on this topic and have someone all of these years later truly understand the impact it has on women.
I have done the very same thing. You see other women still functioning while pregnant and you don't understand that they just are not experiencing what you are experiencing.
I have a great PCP and a great OBGYN now who both completely understand how serious HG is and that it needs treatment. But I have had some docs in the past who only underscore the "you are just being silly/weak" thing. I've also have friends see me and say things like "you don't look sick!" Well, sorry I don't look as sick as I feel!
Wow! This is great news! I didn't have HG but I was so miserable, and I know many women have it worse than I do.
I think there's some potential that this might help with "regular" morning sickness, too, which can be bad enough!! I hate that because it's "normal" it's just considered perfectly fine.
Yes! I feel pulled in different directions when talking about my experience of pregnancy. No one wants to hear about how hard it is, and I want to be careful not to imply that I don't love my kids (I do! It's normal to do difficult things for people that you love! The fact that it's difficult doesn't mean you love them less!). But the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and if we all suffer in silence then nobody's going to be aware that it's an issue. In Catholic circles, at least the ones I've been in, it sometimes seems like you're not allowed to be public about the difficulties of pregnancy -- we all need to be glowing all the time, and thrilled, and if you're limiting family size or nervous about pregnancy because pregnancy is miserable, then shame on you for not glowing more! St. Paul says we were bought with a price, and of course he was talking about Christ, but we mothers -- and I think especially mothers who have difficult pregnancies and deliveries -- know that in a very powerful way. We know the price *we* paid to bring our children into the world, and we know that our children are *worth* that price. I think this is where the motherly protectiveness comes from. We have invested *so much* in our children's existence and we don't want it to be a sunk cost. I believe this is how God feels about us, too. (I took at St. Paul class last semester and it was also the anniversary of a very scary L&D that I experienced, so all this was on my mind.)
I'm blown away by this insight, that we know the price *and* we know it is worth it.
Wow.
I would love to read an essay by you about this, Mary.
Also: if we had our sisters and close friends and neighbors with whom to commiserate over the hard parts, then perhaps we wouldn't feel the need to talk about the hard parts publicly. But we're atomized, so maybe we can't talk to close people about this, and maybe they wouldn't know enough as a small group about these things anyways, necessarily, because we've lost the collective memory in this area, and we're having fewer and fewer children and less and less experience with all of this. So if it's not part of the public conversation, it's not part of the conversation at all -- because private and semi-public conversation and fellowship is waning, and waning fast.
I'll see what I can do. I've got a few other projects in the hopper right now... but I love Julian of Norwich on Christ as mother.
https://fairerdisputations.org/toward-a-theology-of-birth-jennifer-banks-julian-of-norwich-and-the-acceptance-of-suffering/
Yeah, I don't know! I did have lots of private conversations with more experienced moms as I tried to figure out how to handle my first trimesters, and there was lots of advice and commiseration and prayer. But none of that private conversation is going to put fire in the belly of researchers to figure out how to improve things. We need the researchers and research funders to know that women are suffering a lot and that this suffering matters enough to do some research on how to alleviate it.
Yes, that's a good point. Something like HG, for example, can't be solved by woman-to-woman advice alone. We need research and medicine for it, and to get that, we need Kate Middleton's HG appearing in the papers. And other such public things.
I so often feel that the only acceptable extremes are: "Pregnancy was so difficult that we took permanent measures, I can't do that again" or "I am so so blessed to have seventeen children" (I exaggerate for effect). I think the reality of it being a tenuous battle between love, human desire for autonomy, the great joys and the great sorrows to be much more accurate. I think many mothers of large families feel the need to defend the choice, and thus are afraid if they voice how difficult it is they will be chastised for being irresponsible and continuing to have children (this especially in conservative evangelical circles where there isn't a strict teaching and birth control can be seen as "responsible"). Which, like you say, is so unlike the model we're given. Christ counted the cost, we can too. But this also doesn't mean we just put on blinders as to the cost and real wear that pregnancy, birth and mothering encompass. Maternal depletion -- from a nutritional standpoint, emotional etc... is so real. Could we have conversations about how difficult it is in ORDER to support more mothers being able to embrace life? It's this zero sum, no win thing on either side so often.
In order to support mothers embracing life...yes. Because mothers already know it is hard, and if we pretend it is not, that only makes other mothers feel more hopeless.
I know several friends who sadly only had two babies because the morning sickness was so terrible each time. A cure for HG sounds very attractive and interesting! One would have to carefully weigh individual pros and cons, long-term safety data, side effects for a new product. Informed consent is sometimes neglected in enthusiasm for a saviour.
True. We don't want a repeat of Thalidomide.
Fortunately, we already have some drugs that deal with this particular hormone, and one of them is commonly used both to increase chances of becoming pregnant and to treat gestational diabetes that is not responsive to dietary changes. So we're not starting from square one in terms of knowledge about the hormone and about how drugs that deal with it may affect pregnant women and women seeking to become pregnant.
Taking any drug in pregnancy feels very risky, but many (most?) HG mothers are at serious risk without treatment, and the medications that they are already taking are often (excluding Diclegis) Class B, C, or worse. The alternative to not treating it, even with risk involved, is not a good one in most cases of HG, from what I know of the condition.
The drug Zofran is a good example of what I see as a very acceptable risk in exchange for reduction of vomiting and thus possibly avoiding dehydration and hospitalization. A few years back, it was found that Zofran in the first trimester (especially before 8 weeks) increases the risk of a heart defect in fetuses. Many doctors immediately stopped prescribing Zofran to their pregnant patients.
Yet the increased risk was very low, only about 1-2%, if I'm remembering correctly. The risk of untreated HG is much higher -- it *frequently* leads to hospitalization, loss of income, PTSD, etc.
So I think that with HG, it may be even more important to recognize that the untreated or undertreated condition itself is very often the greatest source of risk, not the treatments.
Dixie, do you follow Emily Oster on Parentdata? If not, you should. She's an economist who wades t hrough all the data and how to weigh risks of everything. She'll take any mom-related study and suss through the data very similar to how you're doing here.
Yes, I do! I've read her books on data-based approaches to pregnancy and parenting young children. I'm a fan!
I’m so thankful for this breakthrough. I had morning sickness on the worse end of “normal,” and yet I know it barely scratched the surface of what so many women experience. I pray the solutions will come quickly and effectively, and that doctors will prescribe them readily, taking seriously the risks that untreated HG present.
Isn't it amazing?!
I'm sorry you were on the worse end of normal. That's no picnic.
Such fabulous news that they can finally determine the hormone causing it! I really hope this helps women soon!
Me, too! I think it's absolutely fascinating, too, and am excited to see what seems to be the best (or maybe there will be more than one) way to use this knowledge in treatment.
I saw this! I'm so glad you're writing about it too. I really hope this brings some measure of relief to HG sufferers. I had HG with my first pregnancy, which overlapped with Princess Kate's first pregnancy. She was diagnosed a couple weeks into my pregnancy and so that's how I knew my morning sickness wasn't normal. Her HG prompted me to talk to my midwives about it. For months I couldn't eat hardly anything (weirdly, mango lassi and hot dogs were ok?? Nothing else would stay down.) and I was unable to drink flat/still water for the entire pregnancy. I drank coconut water and took little sips of fizzy water.
I lost over 20 lbs (I had about that extra to spare going into the pregnancy) so my weight at time of delivery was two pounds more than my pre-pregnancy weight.
I'm eternally grateful that my later pregnancies were normal all-day queasiness with only the occasional vomiting, instead of HG. The HG + PPA/D made us seriously question having more than one child. In fact, we didn't for several years. The trauma was too much. I'm grateful we did (eventually) have more children (my first pregnancy/post-partum was my worst), but I hold other mommas who endured trauma and decided to stop with one in the highest regard.
Postpartum and antenatal mood disorders are very common after HG. I'm glad you took the whole thing seriously and waited when you discerned that that was important. But it's a grief to have to do that...I'm sorry.
I think that Princess Kate's public acknowledgment of the condition went a long way towards awareness! I am so happy that you were able to get help because of those news stories!
Yes! I'm so sorry she had to endure it for all her pregnancies but I'm glad the attention helped so many other women. It reminds me of the publicity surrounding Chrissy Teigan's miscarriage and how that opened the door to so many women being able to talk about their miscarriages without shame.
Our society needs better methods for processing grief and acknowledging/supporting others going through grief instead of just ignoring it. Unresolved grief, especially the unseen kind is cavernous and eats at our souls. I would love churches (of all stripes) to take the lead on this! After all, our Savior was one who experienced great suffering and grief, (and not just on the cross).
Thank you for elevating this discussion!
My friend Julie pointed out something really important to me the other day; that you can even receive criticism for accepting help from your mom. If it's wrong to even let your mom help you (you're "burdening" her), where are we supposed to turn for support in times of trouble like miscarriage or HG or whatever?
What I realized was that our society thinks that the only respectable help to get is *paid help.* So it's fine if you *pay* a housecleaner to clean your house when you have HG, but you're asking too much if you wish your neighbors or church fellows would set up a schedule of volunteers for a cleaning twice a month.
I am still mulling this over and I am really intrigued by it.
The solutions that are suggested online to needed help are "buy help, it's worth it," neglecting the reality that many people cannot afford to buy help. But since it is possible and encouraged in our world to buy help, we let ourselves off the hook from offering volunteer social/community help.
I wonder if this is part of the disdain that is sometimes directed toward homemakers. The "responsible" thing is to put your talents and skills toward the GDP and to pay someone else to do the caregiving your children and home require. Neglecting the GDP by putting your skills toward unpaid caregiving is vaguely irresponsible, a "waste" of work that could be put toward creating income.
True. And I've noticed that society tends to praise the people who step in to help the soon-to-be and new-moms, as though they are doing something heroic and out of the ordinary. This legitimizes the sense that women are weak if we somehow can't muscle through the post-partum stage on our own.
Investing in people is never a waste, but I get what it being said about inefficiencies. Yet, market forces being what they are, unless you need specialized care for a child, isn't it more efficient for mothers/fathers to care for their own children? (I'm speaking in economic terms, but I personally actually don't like utilitarian arguments for parenthood. I feel like it undermines the intrinsic good and mystery of parenting.)
Ooh. I just have to piggy back here because my husband and I have been having many conversations about what makes it so difficult to find community. We have observed that most people (especially in our area) prefer to pay for help vs. rely on their neighbors or friends, and then if you happen to not be able to pay for help, it presents this awkward bind of lopsided relationships because people can be so weird about accepting and reciprocating (myself included! but an area I'm actively seeking to grow in). But the piece here I find interesting is this idea of not paying for work being irresponsible! I think this is a piece of it I hadn't thought about -- our culture's hard bent towards only legitimizing work as worthwhile if you are paid. Even to the point that my husband, who repairs things for a living, is sometimes stuck in this weird bind where people want to hire him to do work, where he'd prefer to offer to help (like with folks from church). But they won't ask him for help... And on the one hand I appreciate the consideration of not taking advantage of people, because that happens too. But the whole thing makes it really hard to just give and receive help in a way that is not weird!
Lack of reciprocation is such a big problem. It's just very uncomfortable to accept help from people who refuse to accept *your* help in turn. So it only makes it harder to ask for and accept help!!
The "irresponsible" idea is a very new one to me but I think we may be onto something with it. I wonder if there is a classist element related to the old-fashioned sense of not wanting to accept charity. And yet people did used to accept neighborliness and distinguish between the two. Is there somehow a sense though that paying for help is still being independent and taking care of yourself, but asking for/receiving unpaid help is failing to take care of yourself, so is shameful? Like being on the dole?
I wonder if part of it has to do with a loss of skills that are more common -- probably most people used to have common hands on skills and could help with agriculture or house fixing type things. Many people in our generation don’t have those skills so maybe part of it is that they feel less able to reciprocate and we’re not very creative in envisioning how different giftings can help in a variety of ways. People don’t want to accept something they don’t feel capable of repaying? 🤷♀️
To ride this tangent, that last part is interesting. I've gathered from many folks (including an actual conversation with a family member) that many in the Boomer generation especially think and plan this way about their own elder care: That saving up to pay your own way through any last stages of your life is morally superior than burdening your family with the task.
(I mean, I get it and I've seen the toll it takes in actual life, so there can certainly be some balance here..... but the whole "I would never make them care for me" attitude is frankly a little sad.)
I’ve thought about trying to set up a chore-sharing thing here in town, where anyone (for any reason! looking at my huge pile of laundry to be folded lol) can sign up and request x number of friends to come by, and people can just set aside maybe one day a month to do whatever needs to be done that day. There are too many logistics for me to be confident in it yet but the idea of everyone pitching in to help friends out is super appealing. I’d rather do friends’ chores than my own lol.
Did you read Leah Libresco Sargeant’s piece (I think it was her) on the value of little imbalances in neighborly relationships? Like, cultures where paying someone back in exact change is considered rude because it sends the message that you don’t want to be indebted to them (or vice versa) and thus don’t want to be friends with them? I think about it a lot.
Oh, goodness. No, I haven't read that. Do you think you could dig up the link? That sounds like something I would really love to read.
Isn't working together just so nice? There's so much inertia against these things that might well lighten our loads and our days...so many things that I write "wow, this would be great" but then can't seem to get going. Good for you for starting it up! I am excited to hear how it goes.
https://comment.org/the-intimacy-of-imbalance/
From this Substack piece here: https://open.substack.com/pub/otherfeminisms/p/asking-for-help-and-enforced-pauses
We've been talking with some friends in our area about setting that sort of thing up as well - either a weekend big home project planning chart, or a weekday cleaning circuit (while the children are locked out- I mean play outside)
So I am once again proposing that y'all uproot your lives and just come live with us 😂
I endorse both parts of this comment!
If you haven’t read Gilbert Meilaender’s piece from 2010, “I want to burden my loved ones,” you should. He’s discussing end-of-life decisions and care, which is connected to this discussion.
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/03/i-want-to-burden-my-loved-ones
I think the individualistic water we swim in has muddied (sorry--couldn’t help it :)) our understanding of what families are for and, essentially, what love is. We struggle to give and to receive support because we have internalized an unrealistic expectation of independence in ourselves, a kind of Horatio Alger on steroids, doing life ourselves or with one other person (see The All-or-Nothing Marriage by Eli Finkel for a thorough history of the short but powerful culmination of romantic marriage post-WWII with the “pinnacle” of the nuclear family, then swiftly followed by the destruction of marriage and family). So we can’t reconcile this ideal with the reality of dependency that we’re in for most of our lives (see Louise Perry’s piece on that--thanks, Haley B. for that mention!). Now, we’re relearning that we are dependent and how we are to be dependent on each other. Extricating ourselves from our pride is challenging enough. We also are trying to rebuild communities of loving dependence at the same time--and really, relearning how to love again.
Thanks for the conversation, Dixie!
Okay, I had that First Things essay in the back of my mind when bringing up elder care. haha Y'all are my kind of people (and readers).
Yes, I read that article when it came out!
I also recommend Hartog's Man and Wife in America for a long history of marriage.
I have a book recommendation on this - Arlie Hochschild’s The Outsourced Self is all about this trend towards paying others for things we would have once done ourselves with the help of a supportive community - a sort of enclosure of the commons of private life. Because of course, as you point out, when the preference is for paid help the GDP goes up, and also some actual middleman makes money. The process is accelerated by our tendency to prefer “expert” or “professional” help to “amateur” help, which then leads to a vicious cycle of deskilling like Annelise mentioned downthread. It's been at least ten years since I read the book, but it really has stuck with me and influenced some life choices we've made in the interim (and some we've tried to make that didn't work out lol)
Thanks for the recommendation. I'd really like to read this book!
I'm curious as to what didn't work out!!!
Ha, hm, well, I think overall I would say that our attempts to share more of the work and general activities of daily life with friends and family have not been terribly successful. The things that have worked have been more one-off type activities - co-hosting a party once, doing one big annual canning project together, swapping some babysitting now and then. And, don't get me wrong, those have been great! But attempts at more regular sorts of living-life-together that my younger, more idealistic self thought we might be able to develop have not panned out - things like cooking together regularly for our families with a friend who lives a few minutes away, some degree of joint homeschooling, even just regularly spending time with friends more often than after Mass every week.
I was hospitalized twice for HG with my twin pregnancy. It was miserable 😖 So excited to hear this news! A little sad though that it wasn’t discovered four years ago 😂
I am so sorry, Lara. That must have been extremely difficult.
I don't know if or how soon this will lead to any actual treatments, but it sure does seem promising, right?
Oh, God bless!!!
I can't relate in the ordinary way - my pregnancy sickness is bad, but not unbearable - but I have a severely irritable uterus and I immediately recognize the attitude of "wow, you're (I'm) weak/overreacting and possibly not cut out for this pregnancy thing". So many afternoons wasted getting checked for preterm labor. I love babies, but I'm struggling to get excited about asking God for another because of how debilitating the constant contractions were. THAT part I understand.
I so hope that a cure for HG pans out!
Oh my gosh! I had weeks and weeks of prodromal labor with my first three. It was really draining and limiting both physically and emotionally, and it sounds like you experienced much worse contractions etc. than I did!
It was so bizarre when I didn't have any prodromal labor with my fourth baby. I wish I knew why that pregnancy was free of it, so that I could tell you!!
Oh gosh, you really got it both ways there! I'm sorry you had to deal with that especially after HG.
I will hold out hope for my potential fourth! It's been getting progressively worse and starting earlier with each. Maybe this time won't be so bad, though.
Sometimes you get a surprise for the better with a later pregnancy. You never know. I was shocked! I think chiropractic care throughout the pregnancy may have helped with this some. But I really don't know.
I was an HG mom! ER visits, huge weight loss during pregnancy, all of it. It carried on until just partway through the last trimester, and it took me a year after birth to regain my strength. My God, it was awful.
I was for years embarrassed to admit that for some weeks in early pregnancy, I imbibed nothing but Coca Cola and a few tortilla chips. They were the only things I could—sometimes—keep down. Water was impossible. Vegetables made me vomit at the sight of them. I remember looking at a zucchini in the fridge one day and running to the toilet. We had a garden and I couldn’t even pick the tomatoes because the smell of them made me sick. Bread and crackers came right back up. I spent most of my time locked in a bedroom away from the smells of the kitchen—or lying on the bathroom floor.
I am so glad there is hope on the horizon for other women. The HG, plus my age, played a big role in my decision not to have more children. If I weren’t an HG sufferer, I would almost certainly have chosen to increase my family size. 💙
I'm so sorry you experienced this. Discerning that it would be irresponsible to seek further pregnancies is such a grief, but I completely understand this prudential decision.
I can really relate to what you are saying here about food (and about strength -- at least a year to recover, for sure). I couldn't eat pasta in my last pregnancy because it *smelled like water.* And I remember one time throwing up just from seeing my husband down the hallway because seeing him reminded me that sometimes he eats garlic and then smells like garlic (only to my super-sensitive HG nose!).
I pray there will be better treatment or a cure by the time our children marry!
This is wonderfully hopeful - great piece, Dixie!
I haven't experienced HG, but the constant low-grade-and-sometimes-miserable nausea for a few first trimester weeks was enough for me to realize HG was worse.
Thanks, Haley!
Having HG has given me a lot of empathy for women who "just" have "constant low-grade-and-sometimes-miserable nausea" or whatever other form of "regular" morning sickness they may have. The suffering is significant for many women, even when it isn't at HG level!
Praise the Lord! I don’t suffer from this but know someone who has with every pregnancy. What incredible news.
It makes me sad to think that Charlotte Bronte probably died from HG. It is such a terrible thing.
It's really interesting to hear about well-known people who have (or may have) suffered from things like this. Others have brought up Kate Middleton; it's so helpful to have someone known be open about this condition.
Man. I have such respect for women who deal with HG. I would say my morning sickness is perhaps worse than average, but the combination of nausea and zero wiggle room in my diet is awful. And then with our third I had gallbladder attacks that made it impossible to eat much... after that pregnancy a friend expressed surprise we’d have more because I had been so sick and I almost cried with relief bc someone saw and validated how awful I felt. I just think that people severely underestimate the emotional toll of something that you and baby need for your actual survival becoming a source of severe trauma. It’s not just a physical thing -- people are really emotionally battered from it.
Well said, Annelise.
I'd add that there are many ways (among which HG is one of the worst, but not one of the only!) in which pregnancy can require serious sacrifice on the part of a mother, including what you describe experiencing. But there's also varicose veins, pelvic girdle pain, sciatica, miscarriage, low progesterone (which means taking progesterone shots, so fun), placenta previa, and and and. Then there's birth. And breastfeeding. Etc. It is a gift and a joy to be a mother; but really, it can require radical self-sacrifice of us.
The fact that such self-sacrifice is to some degree normal or to be expected does not lessen its pain or harm or worthiness.
There's a balance between accepting God's pruning through this self-sacrifice and making sure you are stewarding the body and heart and energies God gave you well. I can't claim to have found that balance. So we can both be grateful and willing to suffer AND seek to relieve what suffering we can.
A dear friend has HG pregnancies -- she is expecting her fourth. She is without a doubt one of the bravest people I know. She really does approach the situation with humor, but it's caused so much suffering in her life. I'll be sharing the article with her for sure! Glad to hear that more pointed research is being done in this area ❤️
God bless her, and please tell her I will pray for her! You can do it, sister! And if she needs a cheerleader or someone to complain to, you have my e-mail address, Meredith...
Thank you! I will pass that on to her for sure!
Through four pregnancies I never got the HG diagnosis but the morning sickness and vomiting and exhaustion were absolutely devastating. When I am pregnant, all I can do is be pregnant. With the most recent baby it was probably easiest because the other kids were big enough that I could pop a Zofran, teach the bare minimum, then leave the nine-year-old to make lunch and put on Magic School Bus while I crawled to bed. I think Catholic circles sometimes romanticize pregnancy as a tremendous blessing (it is! It is!) but it can simultaneously be the best and worst thing ever to happen to a person. I’ve thought a lot about this, mostly while lying, nauseous and exhausted, in bed--can you tell? Haha.
I'm so sorry you've been so unwell in pregnancy! Yes, it certainly can be very hard while also being very precious.
I understand this completely! Pregnancy is an amazing gift, but it can also be extremely difficult, which is an important consideration for families discerning when to have more children. I've realized with my own pregnancies - both without an HG diagnosis but also very debilitating until the nausea subsides - that not all families have to discern in the same way. Some couples are thinking primarily about when it works to add another child - when can we say yes to a new baby nine months from now? When we were discussing trying for a second baby and third baby, our focus was the morning sickness, and when would we be in a stage of life where we could handle me being basically out of commission.
Right. It's the same with us. We sure would love to have more kiddoes. It is a sacrifice.
(But who knows? Maybe we will have more! You never know.)
I think its so wise that in the Catholic teaching the specifics of this discernment are left to the couple. Every situation is different. Avoiding pregnancy shouldn't be a requirement or even the default, but neither should we feel tortured by scrupulosity over discerning to avoid.
We can start with good general principles of generosity and prudence and go from there!