Rachel’s Reviews > Belabored: A Vindication of the Rights of Pregnant Women > Status Update

“I wanted to understand the terms of our conversation, whose reality were we operating in. What time period? Who got to define the terms of time and life and death? In so many ways, that fight felt like a microcosm of womanhood—a game in which someone is constantly changing the rules so you always lose. Maybe that’s why I was so bothered by it. It never felt truly like a joke, but like a manipulation.”

“It’s nice to think of science as objective truth, but it can be impossible to entirely disentangle scientific truth from the sexism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, and racism of the people practicing science in a specific historical and cultural context. Science can be used and misused to affirm or deny the experiences of women, people of color, LGBTQ people.”

“In her book Mass Hysteria: Medicine, Culture, and Mothers’ Bodies, Rebecca Kukla writes that the ultrasounds have publicized the interiority of a woman’s body, that they look toward the fetus and away from the mother. Doctors and politicians, to assess a pregnancy, look inside, at the cells, and neglect to look outside, at the mother.”