Self-Care & Support Resources

We hope you enjoy, engage, and learn from this exhibition. Birth is personal and political. The content in this exhibition can elicit strong responses. It is possible to both celebrate the joy and fulfillment that pregnancy, birth, and parenting can bring and also honor the complexity of emotions too. In many people’s lives and reproductive journeys, there can be profound loss, uncertainty, grief, and/or a flight or flight response as we navigate how to get pregnant or how to choose to have an abortion. 

With basic rights to bodily autonomy and reproductive justice under acute attack, the experience of this exhibition, about things that make and break our births, can touch on already raw feelings. To support your experience during the exhibition and afterwards, we have gathered resources for you.

In focusing on reproduction and childbirth, the exhibition brings focus to the physical and sensual body. For those of us who have had the boundaries of our consent or our body hurt or violated, this exhibit might trigger somatic sensations like heart racing, sweaty palms, or fluttering in the stomach. We might recognize feelings of panic, sadness, grief, anger, numbness among other emotions. The body can hold onto trauma and our body might react to something before our thinking brain. As you move throughout the exhibition, it may be useful to maintain awareness of the cues from your body—doing so may guide you on how to best care for yourself.

This resource was developed by Neighborhood Birth Center, Boston in collaboration with MassArt Art Museum.