Frog-Free

Many fairy tales​ begin something like this: a woman is alone in a garden, or under a tree, or bathing in a pond. She longs for a child and prays. She might carve an apple, spill a few drops of blood onto the snow or speak to a frog. Her wish comes true, and she gives birth to a child. But the story doesn’t end with the baby, because her prayer isn’t really a prayer but a bargain. She will have the baby, but she will immediately die of happiness and her child will be cooked into a blood soup by his evil stepmother (‘The Juniper Tree’). She will have the baby, but he will be kidnapped by the cook, and she will be imprisoned and starved in a tower (‘The Pink’). She will have the baby, but on her fifteenth birthday her pretty daughter will prick herself with a spindle and sleep for one hundred years (‘Little Briar Rose’). If you get what you want, you have to pay a price.

In 16th-century Italy, children who asked where babies came from were told that they popped out from their mother’s armpit. In the 18th century, John Hill wrote that ‘whenever we read of Virgins got with Child by Rivers, by Dragons, by golden Showers, &c’ we ought to be sceptical. It was really ‘Wind, nothing in the World but Wind’. There was the prosaic business of making a baby – everyone knew about that – and then there was the essential mystery of human life. Where do we come from? What is generated inside the female body? How does life begin? That mystery was the occasion for fairy tale and myth, a story given shape by prophetic frogs and inseminating winds.

In centuries past, women might have lived with this indeterminacy until the quickening – until they felt the first movements of the foetus – but now we can know with more assurance, much sooner. I can take a home pregnancy test only eight days after ovulation and discover that I have conceived, the wondering whittled down to a few days. Private ultrasound companies offer a ‘window to the womb’ at six weeks’ gestation. It’s hard to revere the enigma of human life while aiming pee at a plastic stick.

We have exchanged mystery for certainty, consigned doubt to the past and gained a lot in the bargain. Many people who would not in the past have been able to conceive can now do so. Foetal health can be better monitored. When my grandmother gave birth, she didn’t know she was having twins until she was in labour; her father went out and bought a second everything while she recovered in hospital. That kind of surprise is unimaginable now, with foetal imaging and genetic testing and gender-reveal cakes. But the womb was once a secret, the secret, that – as the historian of science Katharine Park has argued – came to stand for the whole of the female body’s hidden interior. The 17th-century midwife Jane Sharp wrote that if a woman feels ‘a shivering or trembling to run through every part of her body’, she has conceived; Laurent Joubert, in 1578, that she would feel a ‘slight tightening and contraction … like a shuddering deep in the place where her womb is’. For early modern writers, conception was an occasion to describe the otherwise indescribable: a woman’s orgasm, supposedly required if she were to conceive successfully.

In early modernity, uroscopy was seen as an answer to uncertainty. Put a woman’s urine in a glass jar, stop it up and see if the liquid spontaneously generates worms, or if you can see your face reflected in it; if it has stripes, or if it becomes cloudy with ‘little Motes, like those in the Sun-beams’; or if it has little brown specks all over the surface ‘not unlike the gratings of nutmeg’. All of these were signs of successful conception. But some doubted the method’s accuracy. In the 15th century, the physician Girolamo Mercurio complained that uroscopy ‘belongs more to charlatans than to physicians, because the moon has more to do with shrimp’ than urine with diagnosing pregnancy.

Women waited for certain sensations. Sharp listed them: extraordinary pleasure during sex, pain and flattening of the belly, a weak stomach, ‘sowr belchings’ or ‘a preternatural desire to something not fit to eat or drink, as some women with child have longed to bite off a piece of their Husbands Buttocks’. But the signs were freighted with many possible meanings. ‘The rules are too general to be certainly proved in all women,’ Sharp admitted. The physician-astrologer Simon Forman complained that it was ‘the difficultest thing in judgment to know whether a woman was with child’, but this is exactly what most women came to him to find out. He asked them about their symptoms, drew up an astrological chart and made a guess.

The womb – hidden, female, clammy – inspired countless misogynistic fantasies. Hippocrates had it that the uterus was the fountain of ‘six hundred calamities’. In early modern thinking, generation inside the womb was not far removed from putrefaction; one 17th-century Italian physician wrote that a child was made out of three drops of semen and a little blood, smeared together and curdled like cheese. The natural world spontaneously generated creatures from filth and damp: cockroaches from cowshit, butterflies from morning dew, toads from mud, eels from rain. As in the fairy tales, there were a lot of frogs. When Sharp tried to explain how a pregnant woman’s imagination would shape her foetus, she reached for an amphibious image: it was just like ‘those equivocal generations made in the air of frogs’.

I had assumed that the relationship between pregnant women and frogs went out with the Enlightenment. I was wrong. Until the mid-1960s, a woman in London who suspected she might be pregnant could ask her doctor to send a vial of her urine to a townhouse on Sloane Street where it would be injected into a tropical frog. (The frog would probably have been captured in South Africa and shipped to the froggery; Xenopus laevis was difficult to breed domestically.) If, post-injection, eggs popped out of the frog, the woman was pregnant. The results of the Hogben test were surprisingly accurate (the laying of eggs was stimulated by the pregnancy hormone hCG). It is one of those unaccountable facts of modernity: Nasa launched a chimpanzee into space before women had access to reliable, frog-free home pregnancy testing.

There aren’t​ any frogs involved in making a baby now. But there isn’t much mystery either, or much room to express doubt, and it’s not clear that this ironclad certainty has been an unequivocal gift. In the average menstrual cycle there are fourteen days between ovulation and menstruation. If the blood doesn’t come, you might reasonably begin to suspect that you’re pregnant. Whatever outcome you’re hoping for – blood or baby – it might be an anxious wait. If you are hoping to be pregnant, the common advice for getting through those two weeks mostly concerns your state of mind. Pregnancy manuals tell you not to ‘obsess’ over physical symptoms: stress can be counterproductive. ‘Stop worrying,’ the books advise, ‘and it will happen.’ But this implies that if you can’t stop worrying then it won’t happen, which isn’t true. Other advice books take a different and – if possible – even less realistic approach: you should spend those fourteen days ‘visualising the embryo implanting’ into your womb lining. But who can conjure an image of their own uterine lining? Who would want to?

Early modern advice for achieving pregnancy was sexier; the connection between mind and body a matter of erotic imagination rather than anxious control. Heat was essential. The movement and pleasure and friction of sex drew seed from the body. Men were advised to chew whole peppercorns and smear the paste onto the penis before sex, or oil it with musk. Machiavelli suggested a light meal of onions, fava beans and pigeon cooked very rare – these foods were intended to heat the body and bring it to frothing point. A woman might try very small roasted octopuses. She could tar her vagina with warming frankincense. The physician Michele Savonarola emphasised foreplay and, ideally, simultaneous orgasm; he urged husbands to linger over their wives’ mouths and nipples. Positioning was key. A woman ‘should turn her eyes towards heaven’, Lodovico Domenichi wrote in 1549, not towards the earth ‘as beasts do’. If her orgasm was required for conception, she ought to be looking at God when she came.

The common assumption is that women in the past were more interested in trying to avoid pregnancy, in trying to space out their childbearing, than in trying to conceive. The experience of infertility is harder to discern, but no less real. There was a wealth of medical advice, much of it shot through with misogyny. Infertility was thought to be a problem of a lack of heat, with the woman’s womb being too cold to be hospitable to sperm and too moist to permit the slow knitting together of a foetus. But too much heat could also be a problem. Joubert warned against those ‘lusty and lascivious’ women whose wombs were so hot that they scorched sperm. ‘Such “burnt whores”,’ he wrote, ‘have no desire whatsoever to get with child. They would need a pint of sperm each time, just to put out … their fire and slake their thirsty wombs.’ Warming infertility treatments would drive such women out of their minds with lust, put them ‘in danger of throwing themselves down a well’.

Ordinary struggles with trying to conceive are harder to piece together. We’re left with glimpses of an experience that isn’t usually committed to the historical record. There is plenty of ambivalence, evident in the words women used to describe early miscarriage: a ‘slip’ that fell into the latrine, a ‘scape’ caught in bloody bedsheets. ‘A thing like gristle’, a clump of flesh, not a person or even a possible person. The woman concerned ‘never was with quick child’ was one witness’s verdict on a miscarriage: ‘what she was delivered of had no shape’. But there is sharper pain too. Grief rings out from this scrap, taken from the records of a 16th-century English church court: ‘John Phipes and Alice his wife are suspected of idolatry. They have a cradle near their bed every night and it is used as if there were an infant in it.’

In​ Conceiving Histories, Isabel Davis looks into the history of conception and finds that people in the past were generally calmer about the not-knowing, about the interminable waiting and doubt. She tells her own story of trying to get pregnant, a story marked by inconclusive test results and contradictory or confusing scans. ‘There was rarely an objective clarity,’ she remembers, ‘an alignment of symptoms with a test which matched an inner conviction.’ Home pregnancy tests measure pregnancy-related hormones, not an embryo; those hormones can linger for weeks after a miscarriage. The blue line can bluff.

‘What [was] hee in his Mothers Womb,’ the 17th-century physician William Harvey wondered: ‘whether three bubbles? Or some rude and indigested lump?’ We have better answers to Harvey’s question now, but many others remain unanswered. Fertility doctors can sort and tidy sperm, for example – selecting for well-shaped ones, washing them, cutting off any problematic tails, eliminating the dented ones or the ones with two heads – but they don’t know for certain that pretty sperm get better results. People undergoing fertility treatment are given the opportunity to purchase time-lapse imaging of their embryos, and the images are used to choose those supposedly most likely to achieve pregnancy, but it’s unclear whether such technology helps.

So there is still some mystery, maybe more than we care to admit. It would be better to acknowledge this, Davis suggests; better to be comfortable with the not-knowing. Fertility technology offers a promise of security, clarity, early and unequivocal knowledge, but the promise isn’t as sure as it seems and the human body considerably messier than a positive or negative on a pregnancy test can convey. The historian Lara Freidenfelds made a similar argument in her excellent book, The Myth of the Perfect Pregnancy (2019). Just because we can see inside doesn’t mean we can control what goes on in there. The process of creating new life is fragile, and reversible; it can be heartbreaking to attach so much meaning and hope to something so tenuous.

If we believe medieval morality tales, only a tyrant would dare to seek such clarity, such totalising control. Texts recounting the life of Nero tell us that he murdered his own mother and then rooted around in her abdomen to discover where he had come from. But he didn’t find out what he wanted to know, so he ordered his own doctors to impregnate him. One physician went down to a pond (of course), scooped up some frogspawn and mixed it into a potion. Nero drank it. As the months passed, he began to have a wriggling feeling. And then labour pains began. He vomited up a grown frog and thought he saw something of himself in its glassy eyes. He built his frog-son a beautiful vivarium, encrusted with precious stones.

Nero’s obscene desire to reveal the mysteries of conception was evidence of his brutality. It was despotic to go to such lengths, to trespass on what was designed by nature as a secret. Have we accepted a more ordinary despotism now, bargaining away doubt for certainty? Fertility apps ask you to hand over your most intimate data and promise that you will get pregnant ‘quickly and naturally’. But privacy experts have warned women in the US to delete their period-tracking apps, in case the information is subpoenaed in prosecutions against women suspected of having illegal abortions.

What to Expect When You’re Expecting assures women that ‘as remarkable as modern medical science is, when it comes to pregnancy diagnosis, it still sometimes takes a backseat to a woman’s intuition.’ The Childbirth Bible tells us that ‘this intuitive feeling is probably due to the early outpouring of female hormones.’ I searched for conception content on social media and I didn’t have to scroll for long before I was being radicalised. One grainy black and white video showed an egg pierced by sperm, glowing brightly at the moment of insemination. It looked holy. The caption read: ‘YOUR SPIRIT comes into the egg as soon as it is fertilised.’ The sociologist Barbara Katz Rothman has argued that ‘the technology which makes the baby/foetus more “visible” renders the woman invisible.’ The incandescent egg fills up my phone screen. There is no person there, and that’s the point; that’s what makes these images such powerful bearers of far-right messages about female reproductive destiny, about life beginning at the moment of conception. Barbara Duden, a historian of science, has written that the pregnant woman under the ultrasound wand is ‘a participant in her own skinning, in the dissolution of the historical frontier between inside and outside’. Put like that, our need to know is just a variation on Nero’s tyranny.

There is something soothing in the evidence that Davis compiles from pre-modernity. People in the past were more comfortable with doubt, and we should be too. But I wonder if we can really imagine ourselves back into that older way of being a body. For every fairy tale that deals with the child’s question about where babies come from, another teaches us that the quest for knowledge entails loss. You make a bargain, the terms of which you can’t foresee. Once the box is opened – once you’ve dissected your own mother, invented the ultrasound – you can’t go back.

Conceiving Histories is an unusual book. It’s a mix of history and memoir, with the occasional whimsical interlude: a script for a one-act play, or a fictionalised historical account, or a very short story. The book also contains more than a hundred illustrations by a collage artist, Anna Burel. They are surreal, dreamlike pictures of women with goat-heads; of swollen belly-moons; of cradles with an abyss at their centre; of eggs and nests and navels floating in starry black. Davis resists a chronological narrative or overarching argument. She wants to reject the idea that the story of conception has a predictable plot. The dreamy, associative nature of the book sinks the reader into the uncertain and indeterminate state of trying to conceive, of early pregnancy, of miscarriage. I liked this dreaminess, but at times I felt frustrated. I wanted the evidence to be given more space to breathe; I wanted to know more about Davis and Burel’s intentions for the relationship between text and image, which doesn’t seem straightforwardly illustrative.

Davis seeks to recreate formally the ‘anarchic’ experience of trying to conceive, which made me think about how much anarchy I want in a book. Quite a lot, it turns out. ‘Childless women are unfinished stories,’ Davis writes. ‘Will she? Won’t she? Can she? Can’t she? Is she? Isn’t she?’ Before I had a baby I wondered whether I would be a person who had a baby. It’s hard to live without knowing how it all works out. The pressure to provide an ending for your own plot is reason enough to experiment with something different, to reject argument in favour of a more anarchic and truthful form. I thought of what Edna O’Brien told the Paris Review: ‘Fuck the plot! That is for precocious schoolboys. What matters is the imaginative truth.’ What does argument – a thesis, a resolution, a lesson – have to do with the ambiguities of trying to get and stay pregnant? Why should a book end in a baby? Not even the fairy tales have that fairy-tale ending.