A pregnancy loss is a site of tension, situated between waiting for the baby, the unanticipated loss, and the often […]
What to Expect When You’re Expiring: Pregnancy and Death in Seventeenth-Century England
On October 12, 1622, a 26-year-old English woman named Elizabeth Jocelin gave birth to her first child, a baby girl. […]
How Did We Get Here? An Interview with Lara Freidenfelds
Lara Freidenfelds’s new book, The Myth of the Perfect Pregnancy: A History of Miscarriage in America, explores the history of pregnancy […]
Making Room for Miscarriage
After I miscarried my first pregnancy, I quickly realized that I needed a historical perspective to make sense of this […]
Over-the-Counter Anxiety: Selling the Home Pregnancy Test
Walk through the aisles of any American drugstore, and you’ll eventually encounter the home pregnancy test section. Because of the […]
The Anti-Abortion Politics of White Women
Last month, the Alabama State Senate passed a piece of legislation effectively banning abortion in the state of Alabama. House […]
This is Not a Culture of Life, This is a Culture of Un-Death
Last week at a Vatican conference on abortion, Pope Francis “argued that children who were not expected to live long […]
Openness and Authority in Pregnancy: Lucy Knisley’s Kid Gloves
I began reading Kid Gloves: Nine Months of Careful Chaos on my own due date, desperately trying to keep busy […]
For Keeps: Teenage Girls and Anxiety around Sex during the 1990s
In 1995, I was sixteen and experiencing the excitement of my first real love. As if out of a 1990s […]
The (Historical) Body in Pain
For the last decade, I’ve been reading and writing about other women’s pain. Contractions lasting 72 hours. Feverish deliriums after […]