I Can’t Have Babies

Content note: this post references suicidality, self-harm and delusional thinking as well as an inability to have babies. If any of those topics are rough for you, give this one a miss and I’ll be back soon with something sexier đź’™


I can’t have babies.

Well, that’s not quite true. I could have babies. I take my pill religiously even when I’m not having much PIV sex, because there is no physiological reason (that I know of) that I can’t get pregnant.

It’s more like: I mustn’t get pregnant. I mustn’t have babies.

You hear a lot of stories wherein someone finds out they can’t have babies in their doctor’s office. Maybe it’s a side effect of an illness, a treatment or a procedure they’ve had. Sometimes, these stories take place in fertility clinics – people brimming with hope and fear receiving the worst news they can imagine, the room feeling deafeningly quiet as the weight of the news settles in. These stories are not happy ones, and I don’t envy them. 

My story, though, is a bit different.

When I was 15 I wanted a baby so badly that I thought I might delay going to university in order to grow and raise one. (I did not tell my mum, who fell pregnant by accident at 17, that this was on the table.) I was thinking about baby names and tiny clothes, and less about baby vomit and tiny nappies, but it seemed very set in stone that at some point, before or after uni, I would have a baby. Probably multiple babies. It was just… a given.

I became sexually active at 16, around when I became more passionate about my education, so I also became very worried about getting pregnant before I was ready. I relied on condoms until one broke, at which point I started on the pill. I tolerated the first one I tried really well, which I was pleasantly surprised by, but my anxiety was still so intense that I would examine whatever beverage I had taken my pill with, sometimes with my phone’s torch, to make sure I hadn’t backwashed it into my drink. At this point, I still very, very much wanted to have babies, but I wanted to have babies when I was good and settled. Maybe at the grand old age of 22, I thought vaguely, but I didn’t have a timeline set in stone; I just had a list of pre-pregnancy requirements, like fixing all my trauma in therapy (ha) and finding myself a stable income (ha ha). I knew that my suspected EDS would not be my friend when it came time to deliver the baby – more than likely I would tear, and whether my hips stayed in their sockets would be anyone’s bet, but in my mind, I would deliver in a hospital and heal up just fine.

My mental health took a nosedive at the end of my gap year, a couple of months before I turned 19. I was offered antidepressants, like everyone in my age bracket with any mental health issue, and they were a really good Band-aid for a while. I slowly started leaving my bedroom and talking more, and by the time I was arriving at uni, I was feeling pretty optimistic. My life felt like it was on track: degree, job, babies. 

My brain had other plans.

I don’t know when I first felt the Evil Slime™ under my skin, but it must have been before or during my first year at uni – I remember trying to remove it, with sharp objects. When I shared this with my psychiatrist, alongside debilitating anxiety, an antipsychotic was added to my medication regimen, which somewhat rounded off the sharp peaks in my distress, but did not get rid of the Evil Slime™, which would reappear whenever I was stressed, overwhelmed, overtired, and so on. My first year at uni also featured a non-zero amount of sexual assault and a suicide attempt, and I found myself thinking that my brain might never get well enough for me to (responsibly) have a baby. Not only would I be contending with the inescapable sensory inputs associated with pregnancy, but I would also have to tolerate numerous medical professionals touching me (and, during labour, my cervix). Additionally (and the bit that scared me the most), I would have a foreign entity inside me, and I would have to survive nine months without deciding that my uterus was filled with the Evil Slime™ instead of housing a baby. It was a daunting prospect.

When I started taking pregabalin to help with my still-awful anxiety, it was emphasised to me that I should not get pregnant, because pregabalin is particularly teratogenic (harmful to fetuses). I would have to come off the pregabalin – and ideally, the antipsychotic and the antidepressant – for the whole duration of the pregnancy, plus whatever time I spent breastfeeding. I would have to last nine months with an absolute minimum of medication, when I was likely to be experiencing an absolute maximum of distress. 

It was a slow realisation. A painful, reluctant, months-long realisation that culminated in me concluding: I cannot have babies.

If it were just one of the above issues – the doctors touching me, the discontinuation of meds, the Evil Slime™ – maybe I could manage it. Maybe. I have an amazing support network who would do everything in their power to keep me safe, but it would be nine months of hell for them too. If I made it to term without harming myself or my baby, and I delivered the baby without too much drama, I would still have to titrate up to my usual level of medication, whilst in charge of a human so fresh that their skull hasn’t fused closed yet. I found out quite by accident that my mum had experienced postpartum paranoia with at least one of her pregnancies, and she does not wrestle with psychosis in the same way that I do, so the chances of my developing postpartum psychosis aren’t low. If I think about this too hard, still, I have vivid intrusive thoughts about harming my (currently nonexistent) newborn that make my stomach turn.

It would not be safe for me to have babies.

I’ve used the word “would” a lot in this piece. Would that I could. When my psych and I were experimenting with different antipsychotics, I took one for a week or so that made me lactate. It threw me into a very particular kind of melancholy as I thought, “I would have breastfed. I would have held my baby and fed them. I would have had a use for this.” As it stood, the only use my breast milk had was to leave autism-unfriendly wet patches on my tops and remind me that I had a chest I was dysphoric about, a chest that would never feed a baby.

Because there’s no physiological barrier to me having kids, I sometimes start talking myself into the idea that I could have a baby, that I’d manage somehow, that I’d give birth in a psych ward if I had to… but I never fully convince myself. I know myself too well, and I know that I would not manage somehow. My baby and I would both be in danger. Every time I remind myself of this, it stings. Every time.

I’ve specifically talked about having babies. I do think I could parent someday. I want to foster kids, specifically those in an age bracket where they can communicate their needs to me, and more specifically, kids that other foster carers are reluctant to take – older kids, disabled kids, sibling groups. I don’t necessarily plan to adopt kids out of foster care unless that’s what the kids themselves want, but I think I can do some really valuable caring/parenting, partly because I have been a traumatised child. Retraumatising myself to produce a newborn is probably not how I can offer my best parenting to the world, and even though there are dozens of things I’ll miss out on – breastfeeding, cosleeping, tiny baby clothes – there are hundreds more beautifully rewarding bits of parenting I’ll get to experience, and I genuinely look forward to that. I can’t have babies, but I can have kids. I can have family. I can have love. That will be enough.