By Kristen Euretig CFP, Founder
March is Women’s History Month, a time to reflect on the progress women and non-binary people have made and the injustices that persist. International Women’s Day, which takes place annually on March 8, has its roots right here in New York, where 15,000 women marched to demand better pay, shorter hours, and voting rights. Over a century later, we have made undeniable progress—yet not nearly enough.
This administration, like so many before it, has continued to elevate men, some with histories of violence against women and gender-expansive individuals, to positions of power. The message remains clear: men’s contributions are prioritized and celebrated, while women and gender-expansive individuals continue to fight for recognition, respect, and basic rights.
After a complicated labor that ended in an emergency C-section, I found myself in a shared hospital room, alone and in pain. My partner wasn’t allowed to stay overnight unless we paid $900 for a private room—a price a friend once joked made it the “shittiest, most expensive hotel room ever.” My body was wrecked from severe anemia and preeclampsia, recovering from major abdominal surgery, and sleep-deprived while simultaneously caring for a newborn baby. Across from me, my roommate groaned in pain as she limped to the bathroom. In that moment, the maternity ward felt less like a place of new life and more like a battlefield hospital—far from home, isolated, with triage nurses tending to us as our bloodied and exhausted bodies lay in recovery from our sacrifice.
And that’s when I thought: Why do we tell military personnel, and not birthing people, “Thank you for your service”?
Thank you for giving your body, your life, your career, your health over to create life. I come from a military family, and I still ask, what service compares to this? It is a far less physical act to take a life than to give birth to one. And yet, our society reveres fallen soldiers while the people who risk their lives to bring life into the world remain overlooked. On Memorial Day and Veterans Day, we honor soldiers with parades, speeches, and a day off. Meanwhile, Mother’s Day isn’t even a national holiday that warrants rest. In fact, birthing people are expected to guess what? Spend it doing more caregiving! And we pair it with Father’s Day, because heaven forbid women and birthing parents receive recognition without equal honor being bestowed on their male counterparts, as if the sacrifices are remotely comparable.
Hundreds of thousands of people die in childbirth globally every year. Black birthing parents in the U.S. face a maternal mortality rate 2.5 times higher than white and Latinx birthing parents. The U.S. has one of the worst maternal mortality rates among developed nations. Yet, where is the honor, the recognition, for these heroes? Why do we pour billions into military budgets but fail to provide suitable medical care and universal paid leave for birthing people?
And policymakers wonder why the fertility rate is plummeting.
People aren’t just “choosing” not to have children necessarily, although that choice is 1000% because your body, your choice; but many are being forced into that decision by a system that makes parenthood deadly, exhausting, and prohibitively expensive. (Plus, there’s the quality of men issue, but that’s for another newsletter!) If we truly honored birthing people as not just equals to men but as the essential force that carries and births life, things would look different. But as long as we refuse to elect a woman president, as long as women and gender-expansive individuals continue to be disregarded in positions of power, that future feels distant.
What can we do? Fight for policies that protect and uplift birthing people, women, trans and non-binary individuals. And if you see a pregnant person on the subway, don’t just offer them your seat—thank them for their service to humanity.
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