Katy Huie Harrison, PhD

Katy Huie Harrison, PhD, is an author, mom, recurrent miscarriage survivor, & owner of Undefining Motherhood. She lives in Atlanta with her husband (affectionately known on the internet as "Husband,") son (Jack), and daughter (Branham). She believes our society puts too many expectations on women that make womanhood and motherhood restrictive. Her goal is to shift the paradigm about what it means to be a woman and mother, giving all women a greater sense of agency over their own lives. You can find Katy and her work featured in places like CNN's Headline News, Romper, Scary Mommy, Love What Matters, & more.

Childbed Fever: The Epidemic Victorians Ignored

If women were dying in mass numbers in hospitals compared to home births–15 childbed hospital deaths for every 2 at home–wouldn’t you expect national, even international, outcry try to figure out why? I damn sure would. But that didn’t happen in Victorian England. Or anywhere else during the nineteenth century where the same phenomenon occurred […]

Where to Give Birth Used to be a Life-or-Death Choice

Even With Medicine Where It Is Today, Childbirth is Risky Business I talked last week about maternal mortality in childbirth, a trend that is disturbingly on the rise in the United States, especially among rural women and women of color. To learn more, check out my last post (linked in the sentence above), and the […]

My Guardian Angel Mama

In this final installment of my introductory series, you’ll read the story of the person who made me aware, though she never used the words, of the absolute need for motherhood to be undefined. It’s an exceptional, heartbreaking, momentous story. She was my guardian angel mama in disguise. It’s a story I can’t do justice […]

It’s Not Drinking Alone if Your Baby is Asleep Upstairs

For the sake of full disclosure, this post was never meant to be Part 3. But as I sat in bed one scary night in April, past my bedtime, cabernet in hand, anxious mama thoughts racing, I realized this needed to be said. Let me tell you a story. The Basic, Rational Facts It’s April. […]

My Infertility Success Story: When Did I Become a Mother?

The journey to becoming a mother was an especially fraught one for me. Thanks to difficulty conceiving followed by recurrent miscarriage, I’m not even sure when I got that title. I can tell you one thing for sure. Never before trying to conceive did I imagine that I might one day become an infertility success […]

How Far Have We Really Come?

Welcome to Undefining Motherhood. You can learn more about me on the About page, the topic on the Why Undefining? page, as well as following content here. For the next month, I’ll publish 1 weekly post in a 4-part introductory series. Through these posts, you’ll learn about me, my history, my goals, and why the […]