Japhia Spencer

Pregnancy Body Shaming

It takes nine months, more or less, for a woman to grow and birth a new life into this world. That’s 42 weeks. 294 days. 423,360 minutes. In that amount of time, our bodies undergo changes unlike anything anyone has experienced before. Pregnant women go through spiritual, psychological, and physiological warfare within themselves—and more so than not do we talk about the psychological, spiritual, and even emotional portion of this experience. For the most part, we know that you can get postpartum depression, and with that, there are resources directly after birth to help combat that. For example, we are asked, and sometimes given, questionnaires as to how we are feeling emotionally. But rarely do we ever discuss the physiological effects that our society as a whole throws onto us about the way a woman should look immediately after giving birth.