"One in three births is traumatic. It doesn't have to be that way. Like many first-time parents, Rebecca walked into labor and delivery as a healthy pregnant person and walked out as a statistic--as someone who had a traumatic birth. Rebecca planned to give birth at the hospital affiliated with her university, where she was an award-winning nurse researcher finishing her doctoral degree. But hospital practices and policies that were more than twenty...

"Two pink lines on a pregnancy test. The primal scream of a woman pushing through her thirty-fifth hour of labor. The moment a still-wet newborn is placed in his mother's open arms after an unexpected c-section. The bottomless love reflected in the eyes of a father seeing his daughter for the first time. The moment a baby latches to her mother's breast. Or the moment that mother decides to switch to formula. Each of these, and so many more, are stories...

"Shows how women and mothers constructed citizens, and how public health entities usurped that role, with varied long-term impacts on women, men, families, community, and American identity"--

"Presents childbearing as a labor with moral and social dimensions, offering a way of thinking about pregnancy more serviceable than maternity culture which shaped by medical imperatives and baby-gear marketing"--

"I am the space between motherhood and longing for it, but it's a space that doesn't exist. I can't be both fertile and infertile, our language doesn't allow for it. So, this is the space I have created for myself. This is where I live. Forever fertile and infertile. A mother to six, a mother of one. I am childless, and with child. Barren and fruitful. Pregnant and then not. Lucky, unlucky. A thirty-year-old pediatric nurse with dreams of motherhood,...