A review by mcbolt
Labor Day: True Birth Stories by Today's Best Women Writers by
3.0
It's really interesting to read birth stories. I love how a birth story is almost always so much more than just the birth of a child: it's the story of the couple's relationship at the time, it's the story of their fertility journey, it's the story of their parents. People who have more than one child usually end up having their birth stories blend together. This book contains well written, intriguing stories. That part is really wonderful and we need lots of those.
What bothered me about some of these stories is that even the warm-and-cuddly ones where the mom is over the moon about how everything went contain asshole doctors who say straight to her face "you're not strong enough. you need a c-section." It's full of doctors who perform cervical exams without consent or introduction or hospitals that were too low-staffed at the time that a baby was crowning. Those parts weren't the focus of those stories, but they screamed to me as an indictment of modern hospital practices. That's not what the authors were going for, but that's all I could see in those stories.
The introduction to this book boasted its diversity, but we need more. I want an anthology of birth stories from trans and queer folks, not just a collection with one token lesbian couple. One or two stories were written by abuse survivors, but I was surprised that no one wrote about giving birth after abortion. We need more. This book was probably marketed as too "mainstream" to be all of that, but that's what I want in a birth story anthology.
What bothered me about some of these stories is that even the warm-and-cuddly ones where the mom is over the moon about how everything went contain asshole doctors who say straight to her face "you're not strong enough. you need a c-section." It's full of doctors who perform cervical exams without consent or introduction or hospitals that were too low-staffed at the time that a baby was crowning. Those parts weren't the focus of those stories, but they screamed to me as an indictment of modern hospital practices. That's not what the authors were going for, but that's all I could see in those stories.
The introduction to this book boasted its diversity, but we need more. I want an anthology of birth stories from trans and queer folks, not just a collection with one token lesbian couple. One or two stories were written by abuse survivors, but I was surprised that no one wrote about giving birth after abortion. We need more. This book was probably marketed as too "mainstream" to be all of that, but that's what I want in a birth story anthology.