And, if you get out of the episiotomies and stretching of the vaginal tissues by getting a c-section, you get your stomach muscles cut open and sewn back up again! Whee! After two of those, my tummy muscles are not what they once were. I do situps every morning and so on, but it will never look like it did (not to mention the stretch marks and so on). I produce enormous babies, and the effects aren’t all reversible.
Now, I’d rather have my two lovely children than a perfect body, and it’s all worth it and stuff, but it’s quite true that many women are never quite the same again. But hey, thank goodness for modern medicine, 'cause you would not believe the awful things that used to happen. (Prolapsed uterus, anyone? And I forget the condition’s name, but sometimes the bladder would just fail, and the poor woman would constantly leak urine for the rest of her life–not just incontinence, but no control whatsoever. Source: America’s Women: Four Hundred Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines, by Gail Collins.)