I stand with Planned Parenthood.  I’ve been pregnant.

My husband and I have managed to raise two smart, perceptive and compassionate young people.   But giving birth to them was an ordeal that I would just as soon have forgone.

I hated being pregnant.  I am well aware of my great good fortune in being able to get pregnant at the advanced age at which I did — I was 38 when my son was born, and 41 when my daughter was born.  I am well aware of the whole “miracle of birth” thing — how amazing is it that my body was able to create a whole new person from a couple of cell scraps?  I know how fortunate I was to have ordinary pregnancies, vaginal births, and health full-term babies.

During both of my pregnancies, I was sick every single day for the first four and a half months — as in, so sick that I couldn’t even drink water without vomiting.  Every single thing I put in my mouth made me nauseous.  I ate saltine crackers or dry white bread toast and weak ginger tea until I stopped throwing them up.

When I was pregnant with my son, my hands swelled so much that they went numb for the last six weeks before he was born.  They stayed numb for six weeks after he was born.  My (male) doctor told me that it was fine and that “the discomfort” would probably go away in another six weeks or so.  I couldn’t pick up a pencil for three months. That’s not “discomfort.” That’s a serious blow to your quality of life.

My feet grew an entire size.  Nobody tells you that before you get pregnant.  It’s not that I minded buying new shoes — even pregnant, one has one’s pleasures — but I waddled around on swollen feet in shoes that were too small for months before some kind woman informed me that my feet were never again going to fit in my size 8 shoes.  Not just while I was pregnant, but never again.

If I wasn’t vomiting while I was pregnant, I was peeing and if I wasn’t peeing, I was crying, and if I wasn’t crying, I was either trying to go to sleep or falling asleep somewhere I shouldn’t be.  As for birth itself, suffice it to say that husband and I both come from families with large heads.  Really large heads. As do both my children.  Do you know that a women’s cervix dilates 10 centimeters when she gives birth?  I don’t know how big 10 centimeters is but I can tell you from personal experience that when one’s children’s heads are larger than that, your body rips open.  Yes, indeedy people, they call it an episiotomy only if they can cut your vagina open before your baby tears it open.

Now.  I am — obviously — a spoiled overprivileged woman.  But bear in mind that these were absolutely normal, utterly uncomplicated pregnancies.

I felt utterly invaded by my pregnancies.  I felt as if the body I had lived in so very well for over three decades had turned on me.  I felt betrayed by my physiology, and I felt trapped in my gender.  I felt, for the first time in my life, the way women 50 or 60 or 100 years older than me must have felt every damn day of their entire lives — at the mercy of forces over which you have absolutely no control.

I am simply flabbergasted that anyone, male or female, would be so unbelievably arrogant or so wantonly disrespectful of another person’s physical integrity as to deprive them of the medical care they need to remain healthy and sane.  So to those who would defund Planned Parenthood, I say:  how about I make you give me a kidney?