ABSTRACT
As a midwife I bear daily witness to the beauty, resilience, creativity and variety of women’s bodies. These bodies achieve tremendous physical transformations throughout the menarche, menstrual cycle, menopause and reproductive life. They can grow, birth and feed whole new human beings, and have done so successfully for hundreds of thousands of years, throughout the globe. I am privileged to attend beautiful births where women are amazed at their own strength and power. Frequently, I also bear sad witness to women feeling ashamed of their bodies and themselves. The shame takes many forms, often based around feeling in some way faulty: not visually pleasing enough, not healthy enough, not functional or clever enough to bear and feed their children. Often I see women deeply ashamed about being fat.
