I was expecting a handy theory. What I found was a way of seeing that would help me decode a script I’d been stuck in for much of my life.
childbirth
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Feature, Story
How to Survive a Vivisection
After a traumatic experience with childbirth, Rachel Somerstein struggles to bond with her newborn daughter.
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Feature, Nonfiction, Story
After Three Children, Reclaiming My Body and My Mind
In the wake of childbirth and postpartum complications affecting her mental health and her marriage, Ukamaka Olisakwe picks herself up and starts over — in grad school.
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Feature, Nonfiction, Story
In a World Full of Cruelty and Injustice, Becoming a Mother Anyway
A visit to Auschwitz makes Eliza Margarita Bates only more determined to have a baby, despite her painful chronic illness.
Posted inReading List, Unapologetic Women
Labor Pains: A Reading List
No one ever said expelling a tiny human our of your body would be easy — or if they did, they shouldn’t have.
Posted inEditor's Pick, Essays & Criticism, Nonfiction, Unapologetic Women
A Birth Plan for Dying
Hanna Neuschwander grapples with ending a wanted pregnancy, and finds that “right” or “wrong” fail to describe the moral reckoning.
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Nonfiction, Story, Unapologetic Women
A Birth Plan for Dying
Hanna Neuschwander grapples with ending a wanted pregnancy, and finds that “right” or “wrong” fail to describe the moral reckoning.
Posted inCurrent Events, Story
A Frustrating Year of Reporting on Black Maternal Health
Stories of women of color dying of childbirth have dominated headlines — but little has been done to change postpartum care.
Posted inNonfiction
Walking Through the Past Into New Motherhood
A new mother struggles to make sense of intergenerational trauma, biological memory and the guilty privilege of passing as white even though she is Jewish.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Why America’s Black Mothers and Babies Are in a Life-or-Death Crisis
Reporter Linda Villarosa reports on the racial disparities in health care that contribute to black women being three to four times as likely to die from pregnancy-related causes as their white counterparts, and black infants being more than twice as likely to die as white infants. Threaded through the piece is the story of Simone […]