Have you ever been pregnant? 

Right whale #1004 answering in 2003:

Yes.

IN MY TWENTIES, I was on an academic path to study the reproductive success of baleen whales. I wanted to focus on individual females and their outcomes rather than populations. I wanted to move beyond averages to investigate nuances, to see how our assumptions of homogeneity made us overlook aspects of individual vulnerability. This would have been my PhD project, had I persisted. Instead, I was one of many women who departed from that path, fell from the “leaky pipeline” portal that male academics tend to navigate without incident, while female academics are often sidelined by obstacles. Sometimes these women are stymied or dismissed, their sidelining framed as “choosing not to progress,” with pregnancy and parenting cited as a common reason women fall out of careers. At the time, I was unaware of the vast sisterhood of other pipeline leakers, my own perceived failure eclipsing my ability to understand that I was at the mercy of a system, that I was a woman in the patriarchy. I had not learned to name any of this yet.

The obstacles that sidelined me were a multiheaded monster. My home life was unsupportive, the difficult territory of my reproductive years was in full swing, and I was enrolled in a system built by men, for men. While my adviser initially encouraged me to surpass my own stated goal of obtaining a master’s degree and instead attempt a PhD, he had also left me to muddle through writing a research proposal and somehow learn an unwritten curriculum out of thin air. All this while I managed his lab full time on a part-time salary.

These challenges I might have overcome, if all else had remained neutral. My adviser was far from the worst. It was my homelife that was the most vicious head of the monster. Around the same time my adviser said I was not progressing well enough and encouraged me to drop back to a master’s degree, I was regularly taking off work to help my partner with his legal problems. Sometimes this involved ferrying him across the state to fulfill work-camp obligations related to a DUI, something he incurred while hooking up with his ex while I was out of town. He criticized my help relentlessly. By this point in our relationship, he had already driven off my roommates, and it was hard to make rent with him missing so much work. Cases of empty beer bottles began to fill the spare bedroom, but he berated me any time I put bottles on the curb, sometimes waking me from deep sleep to listen to his rants, lighting cigarette after cigarette in the dark.

When I say my home life was unsupportive, I mean it was doing everything it could to prevent my success in academia.

Meanwhile, my adviser tasked me with writing my own letter of recommendation for him to sign for the graduate fellowship proposals. I proposed to study the global genetic structure of blue whales, an endeavor that would have required the collaboration of several big (male) names in the field. It was ambitious, but my self-esteem was so low from my partner’s cruelty that writing on my adviser’s behalf what a great job I was doing felt like being asked to skin myself.

As I was beginning to learn, the loss of would-be mother whales from migratory corridors is another kind of well-documented “leaky pipeline,” but at least in their case, the suggestion that female whales might be “choosing not to progress” is recognized as absurd. Vessel strikes, fishing gear entanglements, and noise pollution ensure that maternal and infant mortality remains high among large whales. Still, every population study about whales suggests that increasing reproductive output, putting more babies into the queue, will somehow result in higher population numbers farther along the pipeline.

As for the cause of the leaks in the academic pipeline, token articles lament the losses. They insist women’s perspectives matter while never saying why men’s perspectives have always been the default. They suggest drawing more girls into STEM to offset the flood of women leaking out later on in their careers, while selectively also pushing those women and girls out of line.

I could only check the box beside miscarriage in the sense that the pregnancy ended before it really started. I could only check the box beside abortion in the sense that my body wouldn’t expel my undeveloped embryo without help.

How many pregnancies? Full-term deliveries? Live births? How many living children? 

Right whale #1004 answering in 2003:

This is my sixth pregnancy. I’ve delivered five full-term, all of them born alive. Now I have only one daughter who still swims.

I ENCOUNTERED MANY whales on the water during graduate school, but one in particular haunts me. We found a North Atlantic right whale, #1608, nicknamed Morse, with injuries from being entangled in fishing gear. She floated, beleaguered, at the surface, her angry wounds open to the elements where the lines and netting had cut into her flesh. Her breath left little rainbows in the air as we examined her unhealed gashes. The emergency of right whales could not have a more apt poster child than Morse. In 2004, the roughly 300 remaining right whales were critically endangered, due to these gear entanglements along with an absolute epidemic of ship and boat strikes that maimed and killed the whales as they tried to feed, migrate, and breed. Even as I watched her drift away, I thought Morse was a goner. But she did not die that year.

Just before I met Morse, I was pregnant, and then I wasn’t pregnant anymore. I could only check the box beside miscarriage in the sense that the pregnancy ended before it really started. I could only check the box beside abortion in the sense that my body wouldn’t expel my undeveloped embryo without help. It was both and it was neither. It was unplanned, and it threw a monkey wrench into my career plans. It was a big nothing that eclipsed everything and left me emptied out. I boarded a plane the next day and showed up a week late to the boat, but I would have walked on water not to miss my one chance at whale research in the field. As I stood at the rail looking down on Morse’s ebony skin etched with oozing gashes, I felt from her that she knew about loss, too. She seemed to say, “We need you. Hang on.”

Morse was seen with a calf the year before I met her, and now she was alone, exhausted and oozing puss from this devastating injury. Grief upon grief. A few years later I gave birth to my son, and soon after received a slap in the face from his father, the same man I lived with during grad school. That slap was not my biggest physical injury, but it was a hallmark of the worst entanglement I’d ever experienced. Morse and I were both unsafe in our homes. But we were both survivors.

Describe any special pregnancy problems:

Fin whale no. 19 responding in 1962:

I retain one fetus in my left chamber of my uterus. My ovaries contain traces of pregnancy from the twelve calves I’ve given birth to, but that one never left me. Your kind call her “deformed,” but I never felt that way. And please don’t say mummified. I do like lithopedion though, the other word they call my stone baby. She has enough heft to sink me deeper below the surface. I stay there out of reach of the ships with their harpoons. I gulp the deep blue and only come up when my breath is nearly spent.

AS I COLLECTED anecdotes and anomalies, I became endlessly curious about individual female whales. I thought about their miscarriages, how danger inhibits their health and fertility, the scars and hidden stories their ovaries carry.

Whale conservation began on behalf of the whaling industry. By harvesting too many whales, whalers had established that you could harvest too many whales, but researchers assumed harvesting whales at an optimum level was beneficial, the way it is beneficial to mow the lawn or harvest the ideal number of largemouth bass from a lake. The right amount of harvest would stimulate reproduction, so the theory went.

But whales are not largemouth bass or blades of grass. They reproduce far more slowly. So slowly. They do not find the killing to be stimulating as predicted by the self-anointed decision-making men.

How much weight did you gain with each pregnancy?

Blue whale #3 answering in 1999:

Finally, a question I am proud to answer. I gained 45,000 kilograms (that’s almost 100,000 pounds)! That’s per pregnancy, not total. Yes, that’s a pretty big percentage increase over my prepregnant weight. I need to gain a lot to nurse so that I can get my calf back to the feeding grounds. Lactating while fasting is not for the weak. 

And anyway, why are you humans so obsessed with weight? And with female reproductive organs for that matter? You’ve spent decades trying to assess the exact age of our daughters’ sexual maturity! Talk about red flags! And after all that, you still grossly underestimated each time you attempted to measure it, skewing your results to the youngest age possible. Yeah, we’ve seen how you treat your own women and young girls. Yet you never seem to be ashamed.

Science is often labeled ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ with the implication that soft approaches are less legitimate. Softness is seen as weakness.

YOU COULD SAY I became obsessed with the pregnancy outcomes of great whales. I wasn’t the first. The men of whale conservation and industry have long been obsessed with how frequently whale mothers pump out babies, each for a different set of reasons. Because my first pregnancy didn’t neatly fit into categories, I stopped assuming those of the great whales did, either.

I collected and examined the old studies with their gruesome dissection data—cold and calculating in numbers and graphs—from histological sections of scarred whale ovaries. Scientists have pushed their hard blades into the soft tissues of ovaries for decades, hoping to translate their secrets, but the secrets remain veiled. Many of the scientific methods used in whale conservation were modeled after whaling: Probe, grab, harpoon, trap. Fire cold grenades into the females to kill them for study. Fire darts into soft tissues to take samples. Fire bolts into flesh for tracking. Fire rockets into orbit to track tagged whales.

Science is often labeled “hard” or “soft” with the implication that soft approaches are less legitimate. Softness is seen as weakness. Soft tissues are not preserved in the fossil record, so the evolution of lactation has been insufficiently studied. What stays soft is lost. The things that solidify carry on. Our scientific approaches calcify into rigid protocols that persist. Like asking fraught questions on a form, tallying and tabulating hard numbers into strong results. Even those using modern advancements value calculations and modeled trends over observing individual whales. As I attempted to formulate a PhD project, my questions were labeled as “descriptive studies,” and I was steered away from them. I learned to avoid descriptive studies, at least if I hoped to obtain research funding. Descriptions, one might say, are soft.

Have you ever felt unsafe in your home?

Right whale #1004 answering in 2003:

My first calf was born in 1980. I was so happy to bring that baby along with me on her first journey north. But already things were changing. Though the ships had always seemed large, that year they doubled in size. Every year they seem to get bigger, faster, and deadlier. At least they weren’t harpooning us anymore, the way my mom described. My baby and I spent a joyous summer feeding on the copepods of Stellwagen Bank, but after she weaned from my milk, I never saw her again. I didn’t witness her death, but we all follow the path of our mothers, and she would have traveled mine. 

That loss affected me. For years I did not try to get the males’ attention again. I watched my young friend Stars bring her firstborn baby girl, Morse, north in what must have been 1986, and she probably got a little tired of me lurking. You know how it is: That new baby smell is so evocative. Stars seemed fearless, but then she still had her mom, Stripe, around to lean on for advice. Stripe was the cool aunt I looked up to, and Stars was like the kid cousin, born the year after my lost baby. I guess I doted on Stars and Morse. Stars didn’t know a time before the big ships that killed my little one. I’m just explaining why I might have hovered. I realized what I wanted was a baby of my own, for keeps this time.

In 1987, I gave birth to my daughter Metompkin. She lived, but in my complacence, I went ahead and had another baby three years later. But that baby was like my first—disappeared back on the winter grounds before her first birthday. Three more years, another baby lost before I even headed north. In 1997, I gave it one more try. Metompkin and I were both pregnant, and I hoped we—our matriline—might make it after all. But just when my baby girl Arc was born, Metompkin and my new grandcalf disappeared. I hovered around Arc that year. She’ll probably need therapy for how clingy I’ve gotten. But you can’t let them out of your sight. I know what can happen.

WHAT DID THE QUESTION on the form mean—Did I feel unsafe in my home? Staring down my fast-approaching due date with the father sitting in the midwife’s exam room next to me, I’d have to answer in a way that he could tolerate. This pregnancy, my second, gave me my son, a source of profound joy in my life. But birth came with complications that endangered us both, seemingly foreshadowing the weary road of trying to co-parent with a difficult man. So yes, like any whale mother, I cannot think of reproduction without also thinking of danger, of loss, of pain.

I’d stayed with this man all the while, as I lost an embryo, as I departed from the path to a PhD and took the off-ramp to a master’s degree, gave birth, and as I began working as a fish biologist. Eventually, inevitably, my unsafety at home breached the emotional realm and became physical, concrete, undeniable, and I stopped sharing a home with my abuser.

When our son was six, he had a neuropsychological evaluation. His father accused me of causing our son’s challenges. While our child played in another room, the MD asked me reproductive health questions in front of my ex and his new girlfriend.

“So let me get a history. Was your son your only pregnancy?”

I stared at the doctor.

“You had a vaginal delivery?” she asked.

“Yes,” said my ex.

Something snapped in me then. “You know what? I’ll answer the birth questions, as the person with the vagina,” I snarled.

Hearing him answer for my reproductive health made me claw back my right to answer for myself. But I had not yet realized I could refuse to participate in the questioning.

As I came to know more mothers, I heard their stories of horrible clinic experiences, atrocious forms, impossible questions with painful answers. I know many women, like right whale #1004, who answer the question “How many living children?” with a number that does not equal the answer to “How many pregnancies?” The desire to categorize us and translate our loss into hard numbers leaves no room for softness at all.

How many living children?

Southern resident killer whale Alki (J36) answering in 2026:

I have no living children. My son who they called Sonic (J52) was born in 2015. He died when he was two years old. I miscarried before Sonic. I have miscarried since. You want to number my pregnancies, but what is this number to you? I gave birth most recently in September 2025, but my baby died. I tried to make her live. Of course I did. My family sings her sacred name, but your kind did not even give her a number. As if she did not exist. 

What did the question on the form mean—Did I feel unsafe in my home?

Yes ◻ No ◻ Has anyone, including your partner, ever forced you to have sex?

Humpback whale SEAK-1538 Flame, answering in 2025:

I don’t understand the question. Is force not the default? But then, I’ve heard you praise my prolific breeding. “Supermom!” you call me. “She has brought NINE calves to Alaska!” You seem especially wowed by the calves I bore in consecutive years. Yeah, well. As you may know, a handful of us are cursed with ovulating immediately postpartum. The males are like, “Well, she was ovulating!” You know that old song. 

So what if I ovulate when I am clearly trying to avoid them? I head for shallow water to avoid these bulls, stay vigilant, try to keep my distance, but you can’t stay in the shallows forever. So, to answer your question, yeah, they’re aggressive about it, but “partner” isn’t exactly the term I’d apply to the sires of my calves.

Yes ◻No ◻ Are you ever afraid of your partner?

A question can say, “I don’t believe you.”

Yes ◻No ◻ Have you ever had an infertility evaluation?

The questions we ask steer the science we endorse.

Yes ◻No ◻ Do you drink caffeine? If yes, cups per day_____

Some questions may also be statements.

Yes ◻No ◻ Have you ever run out of food?

A question can convey pity and judgment.

Have you been exposed to chemicals (e.g., pesticides, lead, hazardous material/agents) or radiation (e.g., X-rays) since you became pregnant?

A question can reverse the blame from the offender onto the victim.

Yes ◻No ◻ Have you had more than five sexual partners in your lifetime?

Or really mean “one of the answers is incorrect.”

Yes ◻No ◻ Did you begin sexual activity before 16 years old? If yes, age started_____.

A question can hold skepticism and disdain for who answers.

How many pregnancies?

Right whale #3308, Sierra, answering in 2020:

Fuck off. Truly. My mother, Morse, died two years ago. When she was still alive, she taught me about you humans. We are aware of your bullshit. Would you bring a calf into this hostile ocean? My uterus belongs to me. You’ll have to live without knowing my number of pregnancies. I know you’re concerned about our birth rate. You want more of us to put babies in the pipeline, to help you cast the illusion that you’re not driving us extinct quite as fast as you are. But we have lost patience with your process. You still have some evolving to do. So let me ask you a question: