Summary by Louisa Devadson
As part of OWP’s Seminar Series, facilitator Athena Bellas led a conversation around infertility and pregnancy through a feminist lens. Joining us from the UK was Nicola Salmon, a fat-positive fertility coach and author of ‘Fat and Fertile’. She helps fat folks navigate getting pregnant in a weight-obsessed world and advocates for change in how fat people are treated whilst accessing help with their fertility. These conversations are often not had, so this is the start of exploring feminist strategies for navigating them and giving insight into reproductive justice – explored it through the lens of bodies, fatphobia and body neutrality.
Nicola developed the FAT+ve program built on the pillars of Formulate, Advocate, Trust, and Positive Mindset. She shared that the pillar people needed to do the most learning around was: Trust.
“This reaches so many parts of our lives. Inherently, as folks who were born as women, we are told that we cannot trust our bodies. We are put on this back step, where we have to make ourselves thinner, prettier, to access a power that is automatically given to men.”
“From an early age, that we can’t trust our bodies – that we’ve got to change our bodies. When it comes to fertility, we are sold the idea that being a mother or being a parent is an integral part of our identity and our worth in our communities. When you are struggling to get pregnant, that can break down your trust in your body because you are told that is the one thing you are supposed to do. When you cannot get pregnant, that breaks down your trust in your body, and it questions your worth. So, being able to rebuild that trust is such a worthwhile pursuit, but it is one that there are so many layers of, depending on what privileges you hold in your body.”
It’s not a stretch to sense that the problem is systemically underpinned by sociocultural ‘norms’, not the individuals trapped in it. Nicola wants the most significant breakthrough from acknowledging this to be a sense of hope in her clients. She adds, “once they understand that we are all set up to fail, and the reason you can’t access healthcare or tests, or treatments is because it’s set up that way. It is not set up to support fat people. Then it gives them hope that it’s not their fault.”
“When they realise that, no, I’m okay as I am, I don’t have to change to have the right to access this treatment, then it gives them hope that they can find a way to move forward.”
“Having that base understanding that they know it’s not their fault just gives you that power back and gives you that little bit more fight to be able to stand up and say, hey, that isn’t right, and you should be treating me with more respect, more autonomy and more evidence-based medicine.”
Nicola believes feminism plays a vital role in building a supportive community. She says it is the foundation to build on to disrupt patriarchal norms. She adds, “we want to break down to create change, so a lot of my work leans heavily on ideas around informed consent, body autonomy, on making sure that spaces are respectful.”
“When people join my group, there are some obvious guidelines around what is and isn’t okay in terms of how we interact with each other – making sure we know each other’s pronouns, making sure we are not making any assumptions about other folks, and just really creating that respectful space based on consent and autonomy so that folks can navigate newer systems and create change that we want to see.”
“I think there is always more that can be done. Looking at it from different levels – from personal levels, from company levels, from group levels, and more – I think the biggest things that we can start to do is question the systems around us.”
“When we are working with medical health professionals, you should be looking at how can we support them in changing their systems. Ensuring that when we choose folks to work with, whether on an individual level or a group level, we are making sure that it is representative to see the spectrum of people that this issue affects because it affects us all.
“The work I do around fatness and diet culture is such a big part of this. Naomi Wolf said that dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history. So, divesting from diet culture – whether you’re straight-sized or fat – can be an effective way of moving beyond how that shows up in our world and how that shows up in how we exist in our bodies. Being able to divest away from that as a feminist, especially if you’re working through fertility stuff, can be so helpful and so supportive in terms of breaking down the systems that support it.”
“The most important thing that I want folks to take away is that it is the systems that are broken, not you. Whether that is fertility, whether that is any other healthcare condition, whether you are being told it is because you are fat or, you know, because of any oppressions [or marginalised identity], it is the systems that are broken. It is the systems that we need to fix. It is not you that is broken.”