With pregnancy comes a lot of cultural pressure:

Childbirth is the most joyous passage of womanhood! Women should relish having their bodies inhabited by parasitic organisms deriving nutrients at their expense!

Meanwhile, if you’re lucky enough to be pregnant, don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t you dare eat raw fish. No steak tartare. Don’t clean a cat’s litter box. Don’t dye your hair. Don’t take hot baths or go anywhere near a sauna.

To Suzanne Arms, who is founding Birthing the Future – a birth-trauma group in Durango, these are just a few of the emotionally burdensome edicts pregnant women must contend with in modern America – in addition to unpaid maternity leave, lack of access to affordable contraception and abortion, a gendered wage gap and a medical establishment treating pregnancy as physiologically unnatural.

“I’ve seen so many women on antidepressants, it’s not normal,” she said. “They feel guilty about their children, stressed and guilty about feeling stressed. There’s a real need for a safe haven, where women can come together, slow down, calm down and allow their bodies the time they need to heal.”

Durango’s Ruth Carter said the birth trauma group is a vital outlet for local women who – like women across the country – have internalized the idea that even slight deviations from society’s incoherent and vehement rules about parenting makes them bad mothers.

“I’ve been a couple times,” she said. “I feel like it really just supports women being women, really just looking at it from a woman’s perspective, and how we’re set up as mothers.”

Unlike parenting books, the group isn’t dogmatic; there are no wrong answers.

“It’s not structured. It’s open, and it’s really whatever you want it to be. They’re just there for support,” she said.

Birthing

Amy Ginn, certified nurse midwife with Southwest Midwives, said the frantic, contradictory and sometimes morally hysterical advice surrounding pregnancy can be unhealthy for expecting parents.

She said she hates the seminal parenting tome, What to Expect When You’re Expecting, “because it turns everything into a catastrophe. I call it ‘What To Be Afraid Of,’” she said.

“As a midwife, my focus is not birth trauma – of course, we want the pregnancy and the birth to be as enriching as an experience as it can be. But we don’t have control over a lot of it,” she said.

“When you look at the statistics for how many women and children are at poverty level in our country, that pretty much tells you how stressful it can be. We have women who need the basics, like food and shelter, who lack transport and live paycheck to paycheck,” she said.

As is, Ginn said there are several local organizations and government programs that provide some of the poorest pregnant women with a practical measure of help, including Durango’s Family Center, Medicaid and WIC – the government’s supplemental nutrition program for women, infants and children.

But Arms hopes the birth-trauma group, which is to meet weekly in the Smiley Building, will address the broader if less tangible issue of birth trauma by giving women the support and space to talk about pregnancies, life, womanhood and stress – banking on the insight healthy women mean healthy babies.

Epigenetics

Arms said she decided to start the group after reading about epigenetics, an emerging scientific field studying how our environments and experiences change the way a DNA sequence expresses itself. Epigenetic studies are confirming what many believe instinctually: When a woman experiences stress during a pregnancy, it can affect her baby’s health.

How great that effect is is the subject of a lot of exciting scientific research.

One landmark epigenetic study looked at the descendents of Holocaust survivors. Researchers found Holocaust survivors’ children and grandchildren suffered from more stress-related psychiatric illnesses than average, though the Holocaust survivors’ offspring hadn’t experienced higher levels of stress during their own lifetimes.

Another recent study focused on 38 women who were pregnant and living near the World Trade Center at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, attack. First, researchers measured levels of the stress hormone cortisol in the women’s saliva. Some of the mothers suffered post traumatic stress disorder; others did not. About a year later, researchers measured the level of cortisol in the women’s babies: There was a significant correlation between mothers’ prenatal trauma and their babies’ postpartum stress.

A 2011 study published in The Journal of Neuroscience reports epigenetic markers such as stress levels can be passed down through two generations of mice, suggesting that, like a dam at the mouth of a river, trauma can have lasting effects way down the genetic stream.

Feminism, not fate

Ginn said although the science relating to epigenetics and birth trauma is generally convincing, trauma isn’t medical destiny.

“I don’t believe that one thing that happens during a woman’s pregnancy stamps that kid’s fate forever. The research doesn’t support that,” she said.

Arms is similarly quick to clarify the theory of birth trauma isn’t about assigning yet more blame and responsibility to pregnant women: If your partner leaves you during your pregnancy, you lose your job or your mother dies, you will naturally and rightfully feel upset.

She said the take away from birth trauma theory is that society mitigate the large structural problems making it more likely a pregnant woman will experience trauma by addressing better health care, child-care programs and equal pay.

“The pressures on women are so enormous,” she said, “and no one is really addressing it. Society isn’t addressing it. You never hear it in the State of the Union address – though the womb is everyone’s first world, and it brings a new generation into the world.

“Basically, taking care of babies means taking care of women,” she said.

cmcallister@durangoherald.com