Tag Archives: pregnancy

“A year into my degree I fell pregnant and experienced numerous complications during and after my pregnancy – the support I received from Birkbeck was second to none.”

Ella Michalski graduated this month with an LLB Law degree after becoming pregnant with twins during her degree and her daughters experiencing many health complications. Ella persevered with her degree throughout this traumatic time, even studying from hospital. This is her #BBKgrad story.

Ella Michalski with her family on her graduation day

Ella Michalski with her family on her graduation day

I spent my teenage years in the care system with a local authority. When I entered my early twenties I was desperate to travel, so I used my savings from various hospitality and retail jobs I’d had to travel around the world. I returned from travelling aged 25. I had an amazing few years but I was ready to return to normality again and wanted to settle in one place.

My late twenties soon came around and I decided I wanted to enter higher education to pave and develop my career, but I wanted to find a way of studying that meant I could keep my daytime commitment of working in retail. I knew I wanted to study law, with criminal justice being a huge interest of mine.

I came across Birkbeck after friends recommended it to me – studying in the evenings provided the perfect solution. I signed up for a Birkbeck open day, and after attending I just knew Birkbeck was where I wanted to go. It had a real feel, straightaway, of a strong student community. Despite having no previous legal experience, I took a deep breath and enrolled onto the LLB Law degree.

A year into my degree, when I was aged 29, I became pregnant. Unfortunately, I experienced numerous complications during my pregnancy, and at 12 weeks into my pregnancy I was told with near-certainty I would lose my twins. I spent 14 weeks on bedrest in hospital. The Wellbeing Team at Birkbeck were so supportive with finding me alternative ways to study in hospital, and despite being in such a traumatic situation, studying really helped give me escapism from my difficult reality at that time.

When I gave birth, my twins were born with chronic lung disease. They spent three months in intensive care, with multiple medical difficulties whilst they were there. I spent my days visiting the hospital in the day and studying in the evening. Knowing that I could tell my daughters about how I studied for a degree kept me going as I knew how proud of me they’d be one day.

When my daughters were finally discharged from hospital, they were on oxygen 24-hours-a-day for a whole year. Despite their severe health needs during this time, I continued with my degree. It was certainly hard but Birkbeck ensured I had the support in place, and with my strong network of family and friends I was able to persevere and eventually complete my degree.

Reflecting on my Birkbeck experience as a whole, it’s provided me with skills that I didn’t even know existed and given me so much more than I ever anticipated. The skills I’ve gained will stay with me forever and go far beyond just academic skills. My degree has propelled my confidence – it’s made me believe in myself a million more times more than I ever thought possible. When I was able to attend lectures in person, I found the teaching incredible. The lectures were always so informative and inclusive with students in the room, and questions were really encouraged. I’d describe the learning experience at Birkbeck as gentle and encouraging. I particularly enjoyed group work – I found it brought people together and the Library facilities were brilliant as we could book group areas easily to work together.

Thankfully, my daughters are now well and thriving. In the future, I plan to pursue a career in criminal justice. I’m hoping to volunteer for the Innocence Project soon, which aims to free innocent people from incarceration. I also enjoy being an ambassador for the Rainbow Trust Children’s Charity, which provided invaluable support for my family and I through our challenging times.

I’d 100% recommend studying at Birkbeck to anyone – the level of education, flexibility and support I received was second to none.

Further Information

Share

Exhibition reflects on the history of ‘un-pregnancy’ through art

A collaboration between Birkbeck academic Dr Isabel Davis and artist Anna Burel has produced a series of artworks depicting the history of ‘un-pregnancy’, which are currently exhibited at The Peltz Gallery. 

Dr Davis, from the Department of English and Humanities reflects on the research which led to the collaboration.

Finding out you’re not pregnant can be a very odd experience of nothing happening. While of course, there are plenty of people who feel relieved on discovering they aren’t going to be parents, there are conversely lots who feel disappointed, and often this isn’t the first time they’ve felt this way. So, they are (or their partner is) not pregnant … again. Grieving for something that never was, feels strange.

My Conceiving Histories project explores how this nothing, this thing that never was, a thing which I call ‘un-pregnancy’, appears in the historical archives. I am particularly interested in how people in the past thought about the time before diagnosis, either of pregnancy or infertility. What do they have to say about trying to conceive, about on-going childlessness (involuntary or otherwise), about the difficulty of diagnosing early pregnancy, about not knowing whether they were pregnant or not and about early pregnancy loss? What I am finding is that there is a lot of archival material about this apparent nothing. If there are things that can be touched, seen and read in archives about un-pregnancy, then this experience can’t really be a nothing; it must be a something, after all.

To pursue this project, I teamed up with a visual artist Anna Burel who, for a long time, has been working on the female experience of the body, particularly the female body in the gynecological encounter. Like me, she is interested in history and thinking about the points of identification between people today and those in the past. Working together, we have started to look at all sorts of aspects of un-pregnancy; simulated, imagined, misdiagnosed and phantom pregnancies at different points in time, as well as the difficulties of diagnosing pregnancy before home testing. Our exhibition, which presents the work we have done in the first phase of this collaboration, is open at the Peltz Gallery, in Birkbeck’s School of Arts, and continues until 13 December.

In the exhibition we explore four curious case studies: Queen Mary I’s two false pregnancies (1554-1557); a strange fashion for simulating pregnancy by using a pad (1793); a science-fiction fantasy about discovering how to diagnose early pregnancy and date human gestation (1826); and materials from the Family Planning Association (FPA) archive concerning the international transport of live toads for use in the FPA’s pregnancy diagnostic centre (1949-1964).

To give you a fuller sense of just one of these, let me tell you about the strange fashion in 1793 for wearing what was known as The Pad, which simulated pregnancy. The Morning Herald, a contemporary newspaper tells us: “Pads continue to be worn; and on account of these the dress is still a loose gown of white muslin flounced in front, appearing to be put on with the negligence permitted to the supposed situation of the wearers.”

Contemporaries described it as a fashion which moved around from the back, where it functioned as a bustle, to the front. Most of the evidence for it is satirical. Contemporary cartoonists were savage, presenting The Pad as silly and French. They were particularly delighted, but also perhaps horrified by the idea that it was a social leveler, ironing out differences between rich and poor, large and slim, young and old – making a nonsense of the pregnancy swell as a social sign.

A one-act farce, The Pad by Robert Woodbridge opened at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden the same year. It presents three interlocking stories of couples disrupted because women have taken to wearing The Pad. The main protagonist, Lovejoke, sets out to teach these women a lesson not to ‘outstep the modesty of Nature’ by wearing one. Two of the stories end happily but the third is more bitter. In this story, Sir Simon Meagre and his wife are childless after years of trying; Lovejoke leads him to believe that they might finally have the child they’ve hoped for, although in truth his wife has just taken to wearing The Pad. When the truth comes out, Lovejoke makes an exception for Lady Meagre – she can continue to wear The Pad as consolation for her childlessness. ‘Poor comfort!’ Sir Simon replies, ‘sad substitute for a Son and Heir! – I thought to have had a little boronet [sic]’. Although it is ostensibly a comedy, the play ends on this dissonantly poignant note, bequeathing us some odd evidence for trying to conceive in history.

Anna’s work on this bizarre fashion object explores its tragicomic potential. Her series of photographs show women wearing The Pad, sometimes with fools’ caps. Using the typography of Woodbridge’s play to mark up Pads with dates and slogans, Anna’s photographs explore the emotions around the absence of pregnancy.

Pregnancy is very privatising and not being able to become pregnant can feel humiliating, as if one can’t get into an exclusive private club, or as if the world is laughing. Women and men have long learned to resort to silence about their struggles to become parents for fear of exposing themselves as in some way inadequate. Maternity clothes today emphasise pregnancy as a special category. The current Western aesthetic in maternity wear stresses the neatness of the pregnancy bump, isolating it and giving it clear definition in relation to the female body. For those looking on from the outside, this kind of definition – both to the contours of the pregnant body and to the community of those who can get pregnant – is sharply distinct from the ambiguities of a life lived in uncertainty about the future, the body, pregnancy and parenthood.

The eighteenth-century Pad offers an odd sort of reflection on these complex emotions and there isn’t the sort of evidence that one would really like; what women thought and felt about wearing it, what their motivations were and so on. The imaginative world that it suggests, however, is one in which women can somehow side-step their own longing and the socially isolating experience of un-pregnancy and temporarily enjoy looking pregnant. What if we could collapse the hard boundaries that we set up today, so firmly reinforced by the fashion industry and other institutions, between those who can fall pregnant and those who can’t? Such things are taboo for us: celebrities who fake pregnancies are vilified as if they’ve violated some sacred estate, anyone else is deemed mad.

Yet history and art offer a temporary and neutral space, in which we might think about ourselves and ask questions like: ‘what if …?’

Share