In her well-received first book, Pushed: The Painful Truth About Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care, feminist journalist Jennifer Block exposed the concerning aspects of maternity care in the United States. With Everything Below the Waist, she sounds an alarm about the condition of women's healthcare in America, where women run greater risks of reproductive system surgery than in any other developed nation. Partly supported by a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, Block's chilling exposé unveils a broken medical system and the patients who suffer its inadequacies and abuses.
Block delves deeply into the history of women's reproductive health and its practitioners, contrasting her findings against interviews with modern practitioners, researchers, nonprofit service providers and feminist thinkers. The emergent picture is one evocative of a science-fiction dystopia, a world where medicine ignores the basic fundamentals of female biology while seeking to control and shape it into a more convenient package. Women take hormonal birth control without full understanding of the poorly disclosed risks and side effects, while corporations offer egg-freezing parties to help their female employees put off parenthood. Years later, would-be mothers face painful fertility treatments with no guarantee of success.
Decrying a system that encourages women to sacrifice their most fertile years, Block laments, "We are running a race designed by and for men and literally taking steroids to compete." Meanwhile, matters do not improve in the delivery room, where a full third of women give birth via C-section, often against their wishes. "Childbearing may be the most dramatic display of how our culture has distanced itself from physiology," Block says, looking back over the ways in which the political arena has sidelined midwives, a profession that exists to support biologically appropriate childbirth. She highlights the lack of medical knowledge about pelvic floor dysfunction, gynecology's drift from a surgical profession toward general practice and the influence of Big Pharma on women's treatment options.
Frequently returning to the feminist revolution of the 1970s as a reference point, Block takes a frank and unflinching look at how far the U.S. hasn't come in treating half its population, emphasizing the disproportionate negative effects on women of color and low socioeconomic status. Filled with appalling stories of malpractice and marginalization, her report will galvanize readers to ask how women can demand better care. Everything Below the Waist is a call to action, insisting "[w]e need clinicians who focus less on controlling women's fertility and more on enhancing our health." Women of childbearing age in particular should not skip this important and well-researched analysis of a field that holds their lives in its hands. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads
Shelf Talker: Feminist journalist Block received a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant to complete this jaw-dropping investigation into the women's health industry.