My daughter is the light of my life, but her birth could have killed me. Thanks to the articles I have written over the years, I have not had an epidural. Grays Anatomy, I was more afraid of complications than labor pain.

My labor was deemed normal, meaning I paced, bent over, and vomited every few minutes from the agonizing pain for 22 hours, followed by full-body pushing for another four hours. I still needed vacuum assistance to get the baby out because his head was stuck in my pelvis. When my daughter finally emerged healthy, I cried with relief, but my face was dry because I was too dehydrated to produce tears. This is when things quickly went from normal to horrifying as blood began to flow from my body and pool on the hospital floor.

I didn’t bleed to death because the medical team had easy access misoprostolIt’s a drug now being removed from emergency rooms in Louisiana because, although it’s incredibly effective at stopping postpartum bleeding, it can also be used to induce abortion. I also had to pad it with sponge and gauze and get nine stitches to stop the bleeding.

It took me months to fully recover from birth, partly due to blood loss and partly because one of the sponges was forgotten inside me. If you are a Grey’s If you’re a fan, you know that a sponge left behind can lead to serious infection, illness, and death. Lucky for me I could sense something was wrong and the doctors believed me, they called and found the rotting sponge while the antibiotics were still treating the infection.

I’m telling you the gruesome details of my child’s birth because women don’t usually do that. Just as our culture teaches us to whisper about our periods and hide our tampons—despite the fact that our menstrual cycles perpetuate our species—new mothers are culturally driven to conceal the grimmer details of birth. Our society focuses on beautiful, giggly babies. It ignores the physical and emotional scars that accompany the experiences of pregnancy, miscarriage, labor, birth, and motherhood through culturally perpetuated silence.

I believe it is partly because of this silence that we allow laws to be passed in the United States—because when we name the realities that lead to and accompany their existence, we are made to feel that we are somehow betraying our breathtaking, beloved babies. America’s It forces women to carry unwanted pregnancies to term. I believe it is imperative that women start talking about what the term “reproductive rights” really means; Because that’s the only way to bring out the truth of how important it is that we all vote in this election.