‘There is no greater gift than being a mother,’ says Dr. Nicole Saphier

WASHINGTON DC, May 31 – Dr. Nicole Saphier, director of breast imaging at Memorial Sloan Kettering, is also a medical contributor for Fox News and a best-selling author. But, above all, she’s a Mom who recently published a book about motherhood called, Love, Mom: Inspiring Stories Celebrating Motherhood. She described it as “a passion project” in a recent interview with Rebecca Weber, CEO of the Association of Mature American Citizens and the host of AMAC’s Better For America podcast.

“I’ve had other books in the past; they focus more on health and wellness and health care policy. Love Mom is completely different,” Dr. Nicole Saphier explained. “It’s a compilation of beautiful stories of motherhood, starting out with my own, which for those that don’t know me, my motherhood journey was quite non-traditional. It began when I was still in high school. I was 17 years old and I became pregnant. And after some soul-searching and a lot of reflection, I made the decision to have my son. I was that pregnant teenager walking the halls of high school and he was born about six weeks before my high school graduation. So my son was at my high school graduation, my college graduation, my medical school graduation, and he’s been with me essentially my entire adult life. And I am proud to say that he has now graduated college and just finished flight school training to be a commercial pilot. And somewhere along the way, I got married and had two more boys. So I’m a mom of three boys. And so it was quite an experience for me to be able to talk about my story, kind of getting down to some of the nitty-gritty of it. It certainly wasn’t all rainbows and unicorns and I really talk about some of the struggles that I had during my time.”  

But, she said, “I was able to also, in the book, share the story of so many other moms, many of them familiar faces from Fox News like Ainsley Earhardt, Martha MacCallum, Carley Shimkus, Janice Dean, Jennifer Griffin, and so many other others. But it’s not just Fox Moms. There are many non-Fox Moms. Some were Gold Star Moms that I knew. Some were patients of mine. And I can tell you that these stories are so different. But we all had some of the same themes that we had to lean on our faith, our family, and our friends to get us through and that there is nothing more precious than being a mother.”

Dr. Saphier admitted that when she wrote about her own motherhood she experienced a lot of emotions.  “A lot of things that I suppressed [caused] emotional trauma or physical trauma. You try and suppress those memories but it really is difficult. There were feelings of loneliness. I was frightened. I felt isolated. The rest of the world kind of let me go. My friends, who I thought were my friends, at the time certainly were not. I also had members of the church who kind of preferred that I didn’t attend teen mass anymore. It was heartbreaking for me. But I can tell you that it was overcoming some of that heartbreak and those feelings that really helped me refocus my priorities and there’s nothing greater, nothing more important in our lives than our families. And so that was important for me to realize because as teenagers we are all consumed with the world around us, what people think of us and whether our priorities aren’t in the right spot. So I was kind of forced into realizing, ‘Hey, you know what? None of this matters. It’s all noise around me.’ So while I cried many nights, my teen Bible by the side of the bed [gave me] a lot of strength and comfort knowing that there’s nothing in front of me that I won’t be able to overcome. And you know that old adage ‘everything happens for a reason,’ well I don’t necessarily believe in that but I do believe things work out the way that they are meant to.”

Dr. Saphier went on to address the evolution of the feminist movement in America. “The fact that I am a physician in an academic institution with a leadership position was a result of the women who came before me. [They fought] for our right to work, our right to have an equal standing professionally. But it seems these days the modern-day woman is not necessarily fighting for equality. They actually seem to be trying to erase what it is to be a woman. They’re no longer celebrating the fact that women were made to be mothers and to have a nurturing personality. There are so many support systems for women who don’t want to choose life and the amount of financial and support in general for abortion clinics is just astronomical. There’s not nearly as much support or attention for the women who don’t want to choose an abortion, who want to choose life. I think that what we have to do as communities is to rally around those who have an unexpected pregnancy. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to be forced into a decision to get rid of the child, it just means that you have to lean on those around you whether it’s your family, whether it’s your friends, whether it’s external resources. I wish that people could help lift up these women who truly want to choose life and celebrate the fact that there is no greater gift than being a mother.”

John Grimaldi served on the first non-partisan communications department in the New York State Assembly and is a founding member of the Board of Directors of Priva Technologies, Inc. He has served for more than thirty years as a Trustee of Daytop Village Foundation, which oversees a worldwide drug rehabilitation network.