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By Laura Pappano

By the time Kim Clijsters charged toward the net to hit a final, overhead smash against Caroline Wozniacki and claim the 2009 US Open championship (7-5, 6-3), I was wondering if I really should be thinking so much about her uterus.

Sure, as a mother of three who plays tennis, I grinned with satisfaction to see a fellow mom triumph over a perky and fashionable 19-year-old and become as, The New York Times pointed out yesterday, “the first mother to win a Grand Slam title since Evonne Goolagong Cawley won Wimbledon in 1980.”

But amid the celebratory chatter (and the frequent camera glimpses of her adorable curly-haired, binky-mouthed daughter Jada), I couldn’t help but wonder: Why is this such a big deal?

Was I missing something about the experience of childbirth? Or, more accurately, was I missing something, some critical something that left me when I gave birth? Did childbirth transform me physically, handicapping me in some way that I hadn’t considered – and no one dared share?

The prospect – and problem – of women playing competitive sports, historically speaking, has been rooted in the alleged physical strains that are part of being female and bearing children. Fortunately, we now understand that blood doesn’t really rush from the uterus to the brain making females barren if they do anything more challenging than needlepoint (a Victorian belief). And all those pamphlets from Kotex and Modess warning girls they’d better sit out gym class now seem quaint. In other words, having your period is now O.K., athletically-speaking.

Giving birth, however, remains a suspect activity. But why is this?

Holly Powell Kennedy, the Helen Varney Professor of Midwifery at the Yale School of Nursing whose work has pinpointed a prevailing “fear” of childbirth as a natural process, says, women are just as strong, powerful, and physically capable once they become mothers as they were before giving birth.

In fact, she says in an e-mail, “the physical work of motherhood is considerable and they can develop additional strengths as a result.” She notes one problem identified in a recent study of childbirth advice books is a prevailing concern that having a baby forever damages a woman’s body. That implication spills over to athletics.

“Perhaps the amazement which the sporting world and Clijsters expressed at her victory will become passé in the future with her stunning example of maternal athleticism, where her body was perhaps even stronger after becoming a mother!” says Kennedy.

It is true: athlete-moms remind us that giving birth is a physical experience in a way that, say, lawyer-moms don’t. One has only to recall that conventional wisdom once held that women’s smaller average head size meant they weren’t as smart as guys (nothing to do with being barred from college, of course…) to realize that barriers to women’s participation are often camouflaged as physical limitations.

In other words, it may be time to re-frame pregnancy and childbirth not as a career-ender for female athletes, but as just another type of cross training.

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