too many names

i cannot emphasize enough how important it is that you should ideally give birth in a fully equipped and staffed medical facility or if you insist on giving birth through an alternative method you should be within minutes of a hospital and i mean under 5 minutes if you’d like me to be really fucking frank

like i can get on board with so much feminist theory and stuff, truly, and i do acknowledge that obstetrics and gynaecology as a field holds blind spots that are egregious (e.g. infant and maternal mortality in the black community) but there is no empowerment in risky birthing practices that our foremothers, and i’m not mincing words, often suffered through. birthing is natural, but it is not “easy” or even “innate”, it is best practiced guided and witnessed by those that know what to do in an emergency. you are not reconnecting to any innate feminine nature by practicing dangerous birthing practices—you are recreating a time when the bodies and lives of women barely mattered and it was expected that death would/could occur at insane and tragic rates.

this is a hill i will spend the rest of my days fighting on because while i am not interested in birthing children myself, i have an incredible passion and interest in the field of labour and delivery. it’s been one of my greatest joys to play even a small part in delivering neonates. i do not want anyone to risk their babies over a deeply, deeply misguided idea of free birth being “the natural way” when natural is not always synonymous with the safest way.

So many people think it's either midwife or doctor. It's not. Have your midwife or doula in the hospital room with you, I promise the doctors don't give a shit. Hell, you can have her do the delivery itself and just have the doctors there as emergency backup! But for the love of your baby, go to the fucking hospital.

yup. a lot of hospitals are willing to work with you to realize your birthing plan as much as they can within safe limits and parameters. my hospital is closely and highly allied with midwives all up and down the coast, with the explicit instruction to call the midwife when we know a labouring patient is about to deliver so we can respect their plan. genuinely, you can have almost any kind of birth you want—just make sure that there are qualified professionals in attendance, and it’s not just midwives or OBGYNS you need. you have no idea when you’ll need a respiratory therapist on call, you have no idea when you will need a blood transfusion within minutes or risk certain death, L&D nurses do not have the same training as NICU nurses if a baby declines rapidly. it’s a literal thousand things that can go wrong and you should be in the best place for them to go wrong.

Insurance companies will often actually pay for a doula! Even if you have kinda shitty insurance! It's actually more cost effective to have a doula do most of the work, and the doctors just around in case of emergency. When my sister briefly worked for the dark side (United) her main job for a while was doing the stats to show how cost effective they are.

if you are a parent, or may become one, or you are otherwise likely to arrive in the situation of caring for a child while they eat, promise me this: if a child doesn't like a certain food or food group, you will ask them WHY. and specifically, you will pay attention to either confirming or ruling out "it makes my mouth itch" or "it makes my stomach hurt," both of which are medically important info that children may not provide unprompted. which i know because this PSA has been brought to you by "i spent my entire childhood and much of my early teens eating peas and lentils while wondering why everyone else liked the Violently Itchy Mouth Sensation so much, like were they a bunch of legume masochists or something, before i finally realized that Violently Itchy Mouth Sensation was in fact a sinister demon appearing only to me, and her true demonic name was: Legume Allergy"

Die temu ad die

Hmm. Accidentally looks like latin.

Accidental latin is my new favourite thing.

@theshitpostcalligrapher

Agree, @qqueenofhades, except on the matter of breaking “die ad die” apart. It’s a common structure in poetic and oratorical Latin to jam one phrase in the middle of another. I can’t think of an example exactly parallel to this construction, but I could believe a Roman poet would write it!

....oh my god. You might be a genius. Because what else does Tumblr do but daily disgrace [itself, oneself, and/or numerous others] in the manner of the day, and make numerous scribal errors.

how dare you say we error on the scribes

this is what happens when you buy your latin on temu

I bring a real 'actually people who are pregnant do deserve some special consideration because they are effectively at least temporarily disabled if not permanently after some complications' vibe to the party that a lot of people don't seem to like

i wanna see more art of trans men with boobs where the point of the art is anything other than the fact that they have boobs. i want the idea of trans men with breasts to stop being novel. i want people to stop perceiving trans men as only either having already had top surgery or always binding. i want people to stop assuming everyone with visible breasts is a woman or woman-aligned. i want breasts to become a completely genderless feature. i wanna be allowed to let em hang without being misgendered. i wanna be able to stop worrying about what to put on my chest every day for the sake of other people's perception of me without feeling pressured into getting expensive surgery. i want that to stop being the only two options for transmascs

ppl who don’t make an effort to listen to their partner(s) abt their interests bc they “don’t like it” scare me

do you ever think about how if you dive into the ocean and go deeper and deeper you will pass through layers of darker and darker blue until everything is black and cold and the pressure will be so intense that it will kill you without protection but if you keep going you will find little glowing specks of light, and if you go up into the sky and go higher and higher you will pass through layers of darker and darker blue until everything is black and cold and the pressure will be so intense that it will kill you without protection but if you keep going you will find little glowing specks of light

I love my friends sm bro. Like wdym you stay by my side even when i’m being difficult or distant?? Wdym u indulge in my interests just to find more reasons to talk to me?? Wdym you’re willing to go out of your way for me?? They make me so happy and I feel so grateful for them fr

It’s so sad that students are now relying so heavily on AI for writing essays because they’re missing out on the best part of writing an essay which is when you’re a few paragraphs in and you just reach that flow state where your thought process becomes one with the essay and you’re slamming the keys so hard that you’re on the verge of destroying your laptop. I used to get high off of that shit