The Washington Post April 2003The women arriving just now... stretching their hamstrings until, at 11:30, a voluptuous woman arrives in a cloud of exotic costumery. The woman's name is Sunyatta Amen. She is a naturopathic physician and specialist in unconventional solutions to infertility. In her practice, Amen addresses unwanted childlessness by helping patients change their diet, urging them to forsake fatty foods in favor of raw vegetables and aromatic spices and pregnancy tea, the idea being to "put the best possible seed in the best possible soil." She also encourages them to engage in abdominal exercise designed to transform, unblock, and generally stir and vivify the internal organs.
Which is to say, Sunyatta Amen teaches women who want babies, and are having trouble making them, to belly-dance.
To that end, Amen pops in a CD and assumes a position in the center of the room, cheerful, resplendent, wearing a coin-encrusted skirt-and-bra ensemble. She herself is 6 months pregnant, something that cannot help but motivate her students, most of whom have heard about her class from friends or relatives. "Let's do some stomach work, since the stomach is what holds it all together!" she tells the women, who are still arriving, 40, 50 women now, casting off their coats, forming a big circle around the room. She instructs them to think of their bellies as divided into two sections: one just below the rib cage, and one from the "navel down to the land of milk and honey." She encourages them to practice rolling their stomachs from one section to the other, and back again.
"What if you've only got one big section?" calls out one woman, and everyone laughs.
The specific condition this two-hour class is designed to ease is uterine fibroids, a troublesome kind of tumor. Though they are not cancerous, fibroids cause pain, heavy bleeding and often -- because their growth obstructs reproductive passages -- chronic infertility. Amen figures that 90 percent of the women in her class suffer from fibroids. Some are older women who developed them after having children, but many are younger women who are worried about their fertility or are having problems conceiving. Of these, some have jobs and health insurance, but others make low salaries, or have no health insurance, or are unemployed. They are in no position to pay for the expensive medical fertility treatments available to more affluent or better-insured Americans, though their desire for a child is no less intense. For these women, belly-dancing is fertility treatment, the only treatment within reach.
The women are following Amen's gyrations, bending and shaking, arching and circling, trying to get the blood flowing through their abdomens, with the hope that this will shrink the fibroids or cause them to change positions.
"Come on!" Amen calls, reminding them that in the past year, three members of the class have gotten pregnant. "Let's get those hormones flowing!"
"Infertility is just treated cavalierly. People think: You're breeders anyway. They think: You already have too many children," Amen reflects afterward, summarizing a persistent myth about lower-income communities. The myth is that the less money a person has, the more babies a person has: that the poor are unstoppably fertile, popping out baby after baby that they cannot afford to clothe or educate or feed. The flip side of the myth is that only the rich have trouble conceiving. In the modern American version of that myth, infertility is the affliction (some would say, the comeuppance) of ambitious, upper-income working women who have delayed childbearing until their thirties and forties. The curse of the female litigator, the high-powered woman broker.
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