The Babe

I went through @osemagnum posts yesterday and that of @Oluwamidunsin , and honestly, I was very disappointed with you, @osemagnum. I'm not one of your X crew who cannot tell you when you're wrong. On this particular issue, you were wrong. How can you argue with a fellow doctor who has experienced pregnancy firsthand, using textbook knowledge, clinical observations and assumptions from watching pregnant women, as though these give you the same experiential understanding as someone who has actually gone through pregnancy? Let me be clear. I'm not dismissing medical education. I'm saying there is a difference between knowing about an experience and actually experiencing it. You can study pregnancy for years, understand reproductive anatomy, complications, contractions, labour and delivery. You can become a highly qualified gynaecologist or obstetrician. But you cannot claim to know exactly how pregnancy feels simply because you studied it. You can understand menstruation medically, but you cannot tell a woman what it feels like to experience it. Even men who enter the labour room to watch their wives give birth only witness what their wives actually experience. There is a recognised concept in medicine called patient expertise or experiential knowledge. Ian Kennedy's article, Patients are experts in their own field, published in the British Medical Journal, explains that doctors have clinical expertise while patients have knowledge of their own experiences, feelings, fears and realities. Both forms of knowledge matter. Read: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/article… Interestingly, research on doctors who became patients themselves has shown how firsthand experiences can change their understanding of healthcare and their approach to treating patients. Read: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/article… If doctors themselves can discover a different dimension of healthcare by becoming patients, why is it difficult to acknowledge that women who have experienced pregnancy possess a dimension of knowledge that men who have never been pregnant cannot personally possess? Now, let's address your long epistles about whether a woman would tell foreign bodies that pregnancy is a death sentence if asked. Excuse me! Have you seen the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights publication titled "When pregnancy and birth are a death sentence", published on 24 October 2025? This is an international conversation about preventable maternal deaths, women's experiences and failures in healthcare systems. But of course you and your best friend Wizard or whatever is his name said internationally, pregnancy isn't regarded as a death sentence. Maybe he knows more than the United nations. According to WHO estimates, approximately 260,000-300,000 women died from pregnancy-related causes in 2023. That's roughly one-two women every two minutes, 712 to 1000 women in a day. Source: who.int/news-room/fact-sheet… When women say pregnancy can be a death sentence, understand that it is a figure of speech, a metaphor communicating the dangers, suffering, complications and sometimes fatal consequences of pregnancy and childbirth. Nobody is claiming every pregnancy ends in death. You can disagree with the wording, present medical statistics and explain that many women have healthy pregnancies. That's valid. But you cannot use your medical qualification to invalidate women's lived experiences. Why should a woman need international approval before she is allowed to describe what pregnancy feels like? I am not one of your X friends. I'm not here to cheer you on when your argument falls below the bare minimum. Being educated should make us more willing to learn, not more arrogant about things we have never experienced. You can be an expert on pregnancy without being an expert on what it feels like to be pregnant. Please learn the difference. ~Tejiomo