My Body Is Not Defined By Pregnancy

“The Belly Project” has been hailed as “sad, beautiful, empowering, overwhelming.” I’ll add another: problematic.

The product of sex educator Karen Rayne and midwife Christy Tashjian, the blog records user-submitted photos of women’s disembodied bellies, accompanied by the belly’s age and reproductive history. The point of the blog, the creators write, is to “put our bellies in perspective,” as bellies are “intimately related our sexuality and to our reproductive lives. It’s a complicated interaction, that confluence of sex and babies.”

A typical submission looks something like this:

It is complicated, that “confluence of sex and babies.” My midsection’s ability to create proto-humans is something I have to fight against every fucking day. Getting a birth control prescription. Paying for it. Taking it every day. Wondering if I’m pregnant. Buying pregnancy tests. Defending why I don’t want children. Swallowing painkillers for my ovaries. Bleeding out of my vagina. Dealing with CVS while bleeding out of my vagina.

Being able to make babies sucks. But I do a lot of other things with my belly, too. I fill it with tacos. I lay on it. I put beer in it. I do the odd sit-up. I bend it over when I bike to work. Most of the time, though, it just sits above my legs and under my boobs as I type on the computer all day, and I never think about the thing.

This is not a perspective on the belly supported by the Belly Project:

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