This blog post, written in December 2021, remains eerily relevant.
Hello dear friends,
It’s been a tough week for reproductive health in America. I started this note waiting for a gynecological ultrasound scan and finished this after my gynecologist and I shared a cry. The irony is not lost on me.
The Mississippi abortion case argued before the Supreme Court (Dobbs v. Jackson) revealed just how deeply America still questions women’s rights to self-determination and bodily autonomy — I’m not simply talking about abortion access and Dobb’s second-order effects on birth control and IVF; but rather, the reflection of how our desires, wants, and selves are subsumed by the few’s outdated social and cultural expectations. The statement from Justice Brett Kavanaugh that “you can’t accommodate both interests [of a woman and a fetus]; you have to pick” makes it abundantly clear that our interests mean nothing, our bodies are merely machines to produce offspring. The argument from Justice Amy Coney Barrett that safe-haven laws — the protection to give up a newborn — preclude the need for abortion, is in effect a statement that our desires for how we want to live our lives, our realities of unstable work hours, our goals for our careers; none of that matters. That the major medical events of pregnancy and birth are expectations from us. That the act of giving up a child is not real trauma we feel.
Mel and I started this company with eyes wide open to the uphill battle we faced: that in order to close the gender wage gap, not only did we need to tackle the childcare crisis and provide the necessary care support for women to work, but we also needed to produce compelling data that demonstrates where attitudes and assumptions about women’s work and wants continue to persist and hold us back. It’s more apparent now than ever that those attitudes and assumptions are insidious and deeply embedded. I don’t know what it means right now, besides knowing a larger challenge looms beyond just care that I haven’t yet wrapped my arms around. But I promise to keep you posted. And we promise to keep moving forward, one foot in front of the other, to tackle what is known — this monster of a childcare challenge we can wrap our arms around — and we know you will too.
We’re in this together.
Siran (She/Her)
CEO & Co-founder of Mirza
