A young woman recently left me with my hair standing on end, when she said some of her friends and acquaintances with money have had children by surrogacy, as a choice on their path to motherhood.
I asked whether they were sick or had gynaecological complications, and she said, “Nope. They don’t want a pregnancy to ruin their figures, or pushing a baby that may disorganize their vaginas…” Chei!
And I thought I had heard it all. Technological advancement in reproductive health now has women growing families without ever feeling a contraction, or a bout of morning sickness.
Not because they have an infertility problem, but because they have the money and there is another group of women that need the money. So, each time the babies are due for siblings, they call up the centres for surrogacy services and deliver their eggs and husbands’ sperm for the needful.
Are their fears founded? To a small, ‘selfish’ extent, yes, especially considering the modern trends of childbirth where things such as episiotomies are not elective in most places. A mother is ordered to push the baby, and the next thing she feels is the midwife snipping away at her perineum – that skin between the vagina and the anus – to ease delivery.
But little do these midwives know, that “one entire and distinct sexual neural network originates for women right here in the perineum. And it is this sexual neural network that, as one physician pointed out with alarm, is routinely cut during an episiotomy for a difficult delivery”.
That is according to researcher Naomi Wolfe, as published in her Vagina; A New Biography. She writes: “Unsurprisingly, many women report diminished sexual sensation after childbirth, and especially after undergoing an episiotomy, though they are almost never informed by hospitals that an episiotomy will sever a sexual nerve system.”
Don’t even get me started on female genital mutilation (FGM) and its effects on a woman’s sexual sensation and response. A Ugandan physician who worked with the Pokot in Northwestern Kenya, once told me that not only are the Pokot women circumcised, they are also stitched up afterwards, and their first encounters with penetrative sex and childbirth are usually traumatizing episodes.
Remember, many neural pathways for women, according to science, originate in the clitoris. And that, among other parts, is what FGM goes for. So, back to the modern, rich Ugandan women who elect to have other women’s perineum to be snipped and stitched back after the baby; they claim to be afraid of these physical changes that come with childbirth, which could compromise the health of their marriages.
Interestingly, there was also a time when the episiotomy was requested for specifically by laboring mothers that claimed they did not want their babies’ births to stretch them unnecessarily and compromise their husbands’ enjoyment of sex.
Little did they know, they were compromising their own joy in the bedroom. Wolf argues that women’s bodies are designed to receive pleasure; it is a pity that only a few know the real beauty in lovemaking.
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