how influence replaced instinct

the business of bringing life
being a woman is not easy — not when the world calls harm empowerment and expects her to smile through it.

a woman’s body was designed to carry and deliver a child naturally,
but somewhere along the way pregnancy stopped being a rhythm
and became a condition.
a medical event.
a risk.
a business.

and the saddest part is how normal it all looks now.

women attend appointment after appointment,
not because their bodies are failing,
but because someone needs to cash a check.
because the system needs her to need it.
because fear has replaced instinct.

and when you trace it back, the pattern is painfully clear:
years of hormones, years of pills, years of injections,
years of ingesting what was never meant for the body —
so when she finally conceives,
the system doesn’t see her.
it sees the accumulated interference of generations.

so she is treated like a problem,
not a person.
like a risk,
not a mother.

and the influence of movies and media‑shaped icons only tightens the script.
every film shows a hospital birth.
every media‑shaped icons posts a hospital birth.
every show dramatizes a hospital birth.
visuals become truth.
truth becomes culture.
culture becomes obedience.

so when i asked women — even older women — about home birth,
they laughed.
“maureen, we are in the 21st century, who does that.”
ouch.

their laughter wasn’t confidence.
it was fear dressed as modernity.
conditioning disguised as progress.

but nothing opened my eyes like watching my sister labour.

she trusted the hospital because
“they know what they are doing.”
her waters hadn’t broken,
her body was doing exactly what it was meant to do —
but the midwife said,
“i’m going to break them for you.”

as if nature needed her permission.
as if the child should arrive on her schedule.
as if convenience was care.

she shoved a stick inside my sister,
ruptured what was meant to open in its own time,
and immediately strapped her to a machine
to monitor the distress she caused.

then came the injections to manage the sudden shift.
then came the pain that pinned my sister to the bed.
then came the epidural.
then came the slowing of labour.
then came the fear tactic:
“it’s taking too long, we recommend a c‑section.”

i shook my head so hard the midwife noticed
and pretended to answer a call outside.

and i kept asking myself:
how many women have been sold fear and bought it.
how many have been guided into surgery
not by danger,
but by convenience,
protocol,
pressure,
profit.

and the ones who suffer most?
the babies.
the “bundle of joy.”
the “my love.”
the “my child.”
the very ones we claim to protect.

the culture that shaped the fear
and the more i looked around, the more i realized the hospital is only half the story.
the other half lives in the culture — the screens, the media‑shaped icons , the porn, the music, the curated bodies that women are told to measure themselves against.

this is why C‑sections have become a trend, not a medical necessity.
so many women are choosing surgery not from knowledge,
but from fear —
fear of being abandoned,
fear of not “staying tight,”
fear of being compared to porn bodies that were never real to begin with.

the absurdity is loud.
but the conditioning is louder.

and breastfeeding?
the same wound, different shape.

women aren’t rejecting breastfeeding because they don’t want to nourish their babies.
they’re rejecting it because they’ve been taught that:

sagging breasts = failure
natural changes = becoming “less desirable”
their partner’s pleasure = more important than their child’s health

and again, the source is the same:
porn, movies, music, influencers —
the loudest voices shaping the quietest insecurities.

so the woman who fears breastfeeding
is not shallow,
not vain,
not selfish —
she is conditioned.
she is responding to a world that told her
her body must remain untouched, unchanged, unmarked,
even by the very life she creates.

the modern performance of feeding
and as if the fear around breastfeeding wasn’t enough,
now there’s a new trend —
pumping milk and feeding the baby from a bottle or a cup,
not because the mother is unable to feed naturally,
but because it looks “modern,”
because movies and TV shows made it aesthetic,
because holding a pump is somehow more acceptable
than holding your own child to your chest.

and what is even more sickening
is how a mother who chooses to feed her child naturally
is told to cover up,
to hide,
to go to the bathroom,
to feed her baby in shame
because she might “offend” men sexually.

oh my…
like breasts were created for men first
and children second.
like nourishment is indecent
but sexualization is normal.
like the body that gives life
must apologize for doing what it was designed to do.

what a world.

closing paragraph
and this is the part that breaks me the most — how far we’ve drifted from our own design, how quickly we hand over our power because the world told us our bodies can’t be trusted. pregnancy was never the enemy. birth was never the danger. the danger was the noise around us, the fear sold to us, the convenience packaged as care. and now we are raising children inside a system that interrupts nature, then profits from the consequences. but the truth is simple: a woman’s body remembers what the world forgot. and maybe the healing begins the moment she decides to listen to it again.