Irin Carmon

Somebody asked me what my book was about.

I said, it's about how America treats you when you're pregnant.

And somebody said, like a child.

And somebody else said, like an animal.

And Maggie said, like a child animal.

And I sort of looked at everyone wondering what their stories were.

America, whether it was through our uncaring, profit-driven medical system or through a system of laws that were suddenly unleashed in full force when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, has failed to see us as fully people, as fully human, who are in possession of our full faculties and instead as a means to an end or a vessel.

Regardless of how you measure it, if you crunch the numbers in the most conservative way, this is the most dangerous country to be pregnant among our peer nations.

And according to the CDC, 80% of maternal deaths are preventable.

There are deep problems with our medical system, but there is something different about pregnancy.

First of all, when you become pregnant, gendered expectations are placed on you to become a perfect mother, to live a blameless life, to be spotless, to follow whatever the rules of the given moment are, even though they shift, you know?

And the other thing is that pregnancy is something that can be both deeply powerful and deeply dangerous.

And it can bring up somebody's deepest emotional, religious, social, cultural, familial convictions in a way that going in and having a colonoscopy simply cannot do.

And it has the possibility for joy.

By the way, despite the fact that people are having fewer children...

According to the census, 80% of women today will give birth by the end of their reproductive lives.

And pregnancy is also the most common reason that women are hospitalized in this country.

So it's also the way in which many otherwise healthy people interact with the hospital system and with the medical system in an intensive way that they may not have had experience with before in research and surveys.

When people who give birth are asked about what mattered to them, the biggest difference was not what kind of birth they had or where they were, but how they were treated and whether they were treated respectfully.

And the experience of giving birth for many people is actually kind of...