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• Participate in GWANC’s Global Maternal, Infant and Child Health Campaign!
 At the end of 2007, the Global Women’s Action Network for Children will launch a large global campaign to dramatically raise public awareness about the tragedy of preventable maternal and infant mortality. Sign up now to be part of it and to lend your voice to this urgent cause.
• Lifewraps Save Lives
 Simple, affordable, and reusable, the Lifewrap helps prevent further bleeding in women suffering from obstetric hemorrhage—the leading cause of maternal death. Help get this technology out to mothers who really need it.
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•Today maternal mortality is one of the leading causes of death for women of reproductive age causing 500,000-600,000 deaths per year.
•In Sri Lanka, Buddha exemplifies the virtues of the good mother, and mothers are considered the Buddhas of the home. This belief has shaped the political landscape as female leaders of Sri Lanka represent pious and virtuous mothers.
Creating A New Discourse on Women, Birth, And Pregnancy
Jessica Resmond
FranceGALLERYCONVERSATION
Creating life is part of the very nature of the feminine body. The physical reality of giving birth is often messy, violent, and bloody.

We don't see images of childbirth on television because it's somehow considered gross or offensive - though plastic surgery is shown in full detail. We don't openly talk about menstruation either - though somehow we're inundated with images of sex.
How can it be that the experience of giving birth-- a process that is so fundamental to life itself-is so difficult for us to talk about openly? We can talk easily about clothing, but we can't talk about what it feels like in our bodies to create life? It's as if the real, messy nature of the female body is taboo in our society. Is this because men (and perhaps women, too?) don't want to see the true messiness and power of our bodies, which contain in them the source of life? Is that why we need to sanitize the conversation, sanitize the images of women's bodies that appear in public?
I created this installation in dialogue with the works of the anthropologist Mary Douglas, who talks about the concepts of purity and pollution. She defines pollution in a deeper way than we normally think about it-as substances that transcend boundaries, and that can't be classified in neat boxes. Pregnant women, menstruating women, the feminine body, and the maternal body all illustrate this idea of transgressed boundaries.
For this installation, I poured flour into nylon stockings and created shapes that looked a lot like bodies themselves. The flour stayed inside, but the stockings were porous, and so the flour always wanted to escape and pour out of them. I saw this as a metaphor for the uncontained nature of our bodies-the porous and changeable nature of our physical envelopes.
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Pregnancy
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katie l hebert
United States
Latest Comment
i'm pregnant with twins girls and i'm due december 25 07
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