The Pitt, “Wild Pregnancy,” and the Return of Biological Destiny
Why “women have always done this on their own” is bad history and worse politics
In the Season 2 finale of The Pitt, a patient named Judith Lastrade explains her “wild pregnancy” like this: no doctors, no hospital, no medicine. When Dr. Abbot asks if she at least has a midwife or doula, she says no, because “women have been having children on their own for thousands of years.”
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
And there it is. The sentence. The whole cursed little ideological nesting doll.
Because that line is not just bad medicine. It is bad history. And, more importantly, it is bad politics.
It is also not the first time I’ve been on this particular beat. In my Bitchy History episode “A Brief History of Setting Women on Fire,” I talked about the long war against women’s healing knowledge: the witch hunts, the demonization of midwives, and the patriarchal professionalization of medicine that turned women’s expertise into something suspect, punishable, and eventually replaceable. The point was never that premodern birth was a feminist paradise. The point was that women were not ignorant by default, communities did not leave childbirth to chance, and patriarchal institutions had to work very hard to make women’s reproductive authority look dangerous.
Which is why Judith’s logic is so infuriating. It takes a real history of misogyny in medicine and somehow turns it into a fantasy where women have always just wandered off alone to give birth in nature like they were extras in a deeply unserious fertility cult. No. Women have not historically “done this on their own.” Women have historically done this with the help of other women: midwives, mothers, sisters, aunts, grandmothers, neighbors, traditional birth attendants, and other experienced companions. Across cultures and across centuries, childbirth has usually been communal, supported, and socially embedded. The World Health Organization explicitly describes companionship during labor and childbirth as deeply rooted in women’s preferences and traditions, and a major review of labor support notes that women have generally been attended by and supported by other women throughout labor and birth.
Because humans are communal animals. We are not cats slinking off behind the shed. We are not woodland cryptids crouching barefoot in a mossy field waiting for “the body to know what to do.” Birth has always been dangerous enough that communities developed people whose whole thing was helping women survive it.
That is what makes the “women have always done this naturally and on their own” line so deeply stupid. It takes one true thing, that childbirth predates modern hospitals, and wraps it around a lie, that premodern childbirth was solitary, instinctive, and unsupported. That fantasy is not some ancient feminine truth. It is a modern delusion with a ring light.
And the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that this rhetoric sits exactly at the weird intersection of two deeply cursed ideological streams.
On one side, you have crunchy wellness culture: crystals, incense, “divine feminine” nonsense, anti-medical romanticism, vibes masquerading as wisdom.1 On the other, you have right-wing biological determinism: pronatalism, anti-contraception politics, demographic panic, and the increasingly explicit belief that pregnancy is women’s “natural” state and reproduction their “destiny.” Katie Miller, wife of D.C. Nazi-Cryptid Stephen Miller, recently made that logic painfully visible when she condemned falling teen birth rates and hormonal birth control, claiming that “our biological destiny is to have babies.”
So what you get is the Frankenstein’s monster of Make America Healthy Again and “Actually The Handmaid’s Tale sounds kind of efficient” politics, stitched together with linen, sage smoke, and a fraudulent reverence for “nature.”
That is what I want to talk about.
Not just why Judith’s history is wrong, though it is.
But why this particular kind of wrongness is doing political work.
No, women did not historically give birth “on their own”
Let’s start with the historical part, because this is the easiest section and also the one most likely to make me start throwing books.
Midwives are ancient. Not metaphorically. Literally. Midwifery is as old as childbearing itself. Midwives were often women who became known for attending the births of neighbors and family members. It also notes that obstetrics was for a very long time the province of female midwives before male physicians began pushing into the field in early modern Europe.
Read that again.
The history of childbirth is not “woman alone.” The history of childbirth is “women helping women.”
That help could be informal or formal, depending on period and place. In some communities, it was kin and neighbors. In others, it was recognized local midwives or traditional birth attendants with years of experiential knowledge. Contemporary global health literature still defines traditional birth attendants as people who assist mothers throughout pregnancy and childbirth, and notes that they often acquire their skills through experience and apprenticeship.
Apprenticeship.
Not “manifesting cervical dilation by the light of the moon.”
Not “trusting the body” while alone and untreated.
Not “just doing what women have always done.”
Apprenticeship. Experience. Community knowledge. Practical support.
And this is where I want to underline something I talked about in “A Brief History of Setting Women on Fire.” Midwives were not just random ladies hanging around waiting for someone’s water to break. They were often among the most experienced medical practitioners in a community. They learned through repetition, observation, apprenticeship, and embodied knowledge passed between women. They were trusted precisely because birth was dangerous enough that communities needed people who knew what they were doing. The historical model was not “woman alone.” The historical model was “women helping women survive an event that literally rearranges your organs and rips you open.”
Even modern public health debates about traditional birth attendants make this obvious. For decades, international maternal health policy argued over whether traditional attendants should be trained, integrated into health systems, partnered with clinics, or superseded by formally credentialed skilled attendants. That debate existed because these attendants were real, socially important figures in childbirth care, not because women have historically been expected to white-knuckle labor in total isolation.
And the companionship point matters too. WHO guidance on childbirth emphasizes not only safety but the value of emotional and practical support, including a companion of choice during labor and childbirth. That is modern clinical language describing something women have wanted for a very long time: not to be left alone during one of the most painful, dangerous, and vulnerable experiences of their lives.
Because again: humans are communal animals.
Historically, women did not avoid support because support was somehow “unnatural.” They sought support because birth was risky enough to require it.
That is the point.
Childbirth was not safer in the past. It was just less treatable.
One of the most poisonous little tricks in “wild pregnancy” rhetoric is the way it turns premodern birth into an aspirational aesthetic.
You know the type. A little sepia-toned fantasy of “ancient women” who were somehow both spiritually attuned and medically invincible, squatting gracefully in candlelight and exhaling babies into linen while patriarchy and hospital fluorescent lighting had yet to be invented.
This is nonsense.
The reason midwives and birth attendants existed is because childbirth has always been dangerous. Historically, maternal and infant mortality were horrifyingly common. That was not because women were weak or broken or “too modern.” It was because human childbirth is hard, human babies have giant heads, bodies go wrong in creative and appalling ways, and before modern medicine there were only so many tools available when things started to spiral.
So when someone says, “Women have been having children on their own for thousands of years,” what they are really doing is romanticizing an era when a lot more women and babies died.
That does not become feminist because you pair it with soft lighting and a basket of organic oranges.
It is still romanticizing preventable death.
And yes, before anyone writes me a 17-paragraph DM in beige font: modern medicine has absolutely failed women in specific and infuriating ways. Women’s pain is dismissed. Black women face scandalous maternal health disparities. Medical institutions can be paternalistic, racist, dismissive, and structurally cruel. Respectful, evidence-based maternity care is still not nearly universal. WHO has repeatedly stressed the importance of improving not only the clinical safety of childbirth but women’s experience of care and protection from disrespect and abuse.
But that critique does not lead to “therefore no prenatal care.”
It leads to “therefore better prenatal care.”
It leads to “therefore evidence-based care that treats women like people.”
It leads to “therefore midwives, doulas, nurses, and doctors working in systems that respect autonomy.”
It leads to “therefore stop treating laboring patients like malfunctioning incubators.”
What it does not lead to is anti-medical cosplay.
The actual history is feminist. The fantasy is individualist nonsense.
Here is what really gets under my skin about this whole thing: it steals from women’s history while erasing women’s labor.
The people romanticizing “unassisted” birth often imagine themselves as reclaiming an ancient female wisdom. But the actual historical female wisdom was not solitary. It was relational. It was learned. It was social. It was practical. It was often literally passed from one woman to another in the form of observation, memory, and repeated embodied experience.
The premodern lesson is not “women don’t need anyone.”
The premodern lesson is “women built systems of support for each other because the work of keeping each other alive mattered.”
That is such a different political vision.
One says: your highest truth is surrendering to nature, alone, without interference.
The other says: your community developed practices of care because nobody should be left alone in crisis.2
One is neoliberal individualism in a peasant blouse.
The other is collective survival.
And it is no accident that the first one is easier to monetize on Instagram.
This is where the crunchy and the authoritarian start kissing
Now for the politics, because this is where this gets chilling, not just infuriating to my sensibilities as a historian and student of gender studies.
The line from The Pitt is not just wrong about history. It also smuggles in a very specific ideology: that pregnancy is women’s most natural condition, that childbirth is simply what female bodies are “for,” and that support, intervention, or deliberate reproductive control are somehow deviations from a natural order.
That is where the crunchy “divine feminine” girlies and the right-wing pronatalist weirdos accidentally discover that they are, in fact, reading from the same cursed script.
The language changes.
The aesthetic changes.
The candle budget changes dramatically.
But the core message is the same:
Women are most authentic when they are reproductive.
That is the message behind “biological destiny.”
That is the message behind anti-contraception panic.
That is the message behind tradwife nostalgia.
That is the message behind a lot of “natural motherhood” rhetoric that quietly treats women’s lives before, after, or outside of childbearing as somehow less real.
When Katie Miller talks about birth control as poison and says women’s biological destiny is to have babies, she is saying the quiet part loud.
When a free-birth influencer says hospital intervention is unnatural and women have always done this “on their own,” she is saying a prettier version of the same thing.
Different packaging, same rot.
That is also why this current moment feels so cursed. In “A Brief History of Setting Women on Fire,” I argued that the panic over women’s healing knowledge was never just about superstition. It was about power: who gets to control women’s bodies, who gets to define legitimate care, and who gets cut out of authority when reproduction is on the line.
That same logic is still here, just wearing new outfits. Now it shows up either as soft-focus “divine feminine” nonsense or as right-wing pronatalism dressed up as concern for women’s health. But the throughline is the same: women’s bodies are not fully their own, pregnancy is treated as a natural obligation, and any attempt by women to define care on their own terms gets folded back into somebody else’s ideology.
Both ideologies flatten women into reproductive bodies.
Both treat pregnancy as a natural mandate rather than a choice.
Both romanticize women’s suffering.
Both distrust women’s autonomy when it takes the form of controlling fertility rather than surrendering to it.
That is why this stuff makes my skin crawl.
Because it pretends to be anti-establishment while reproducing some of the oldest, ugliest ideas in patriarchy.
Pregnancy is not women’s “natural state”
Let me say this as clearly as possible:
Pregnancy is a human capacity.
It is not a female destiny.
It is not a moral calling.
It is not a proof of womanhood.
It is not the default purpose of having a uterus.
It is not the highest expression of the “divine feminine,” whatever the hell that means other than “we found a way to rebrand gender essentialism in earth tones.”
Women are not reproductive infrastructure.
We are not national resources.
We are not demographic solutions.
We are not morally superior broodmares with playlists and glitter bomb gender reveals.
And the reason I’m so suspicious of rhetoric that makes pregnancy sound “natural” and therefore politically sacred is because history is full of people, mostly conservatives, often men, who hear “natural” and immediately start writing legislation.
If womanhood is naturally reproductive, then contraception is suspect.
If motherhood is destiny, then abortion becomes rebellion.
If birth is what women are “meant” for, then declining it starts to look deviant.
If suffering is sanctified, then safer options can be framed as corruption.
If women’s bodies are supposedly designed for pregnancy, then what they want matters a lot less than what those bodies can be made to do.
That is the road.
And I would like us not to walk down it barefoot while burning palo santo to cleanse the “bad vibes” of gestational diabetes and pre-eclampsia.
The real feminist takeaway
The feminist lesson here is not that women should trust institutions blindly.
It is not that hospitals or doctors are above critique. God knows saying that would be dishonest on a level that I cannot physically handle.
It is not that every intervention is good, or that every doctor listens, or that all medical systems are safe and fair.
The feminist lesson is that women deserve respectful, evidence-based, autonomy-centered care.
They deserve support.
They deserve companionship.
They deserve to be listened to.
They deserve not to be abandoned in labor for the sake of someone else’s aesthetic attachment to “nature.”
They deserve not to have their reproductive capacity turned into ideology by either crunchy mystics or right-wing natalists.
And historically, women knew that.
That is why they built birth cultures around support.
That is why midwives mattered.
That is why attendants existed.
That is why childbirth was communal.
If you listened to “A Brief History of Setting Women on Fire,” then this argument will sound familiar. The problem has never been women having knowledge about birth. The problem has been patriarchal systems deciding that women’s knowledge only counts when it can be subordinated, sanitized, regulated, or replaced. That does not mean the answer is to reject prenatal care and hope for the best. It means the answer is to fight for forms of care that are evidence-based, historically informed, and actually respectful of women’s autonomy.
Women did not survive childbirth because they “did it alone.”
Women survived childbirth because, as much as possible, they did not.
So no, Judith from The Pitt, and no to every influencer and pronatalist creep echoing her logic in a different accent.
Women have not always done this on their own.
They have done it with each other.
That is the history.
And that is exactly what makes the modern fantasy of solitary, “natural,” unsupported birth so revealing. It is not ancestral. It is not feminist. It is not radical. It is an ahistorical mash-up of wellness brainworms and biological determinism, wrapped in the language of empowerment and aimed squarely at women’s autonomy.
Which is to say: bad history, worse politics, and one more reminder that if something sounds like it was written jointly by Gwyneth Paltrow and a Heritage Foundation intern, you should probably back away slowly.
I say this as a woman who owns crystals and has three different tarot decks I use for different things because the “vibe” can be off with one of them sometimes. I feel I am allowed this critique of new age culture, I’m in the trenches with these idiots.
Which, on a side note, is another reason why this episode was so fucking brilliantly written because the entire theme of the season and this episode is people telling Robby over and over that “your community developed practices of care because nobody should be left alone in crisis” and that he should not handle his depression via a solo trip on a motorcycle.