Pregnancy Memoir

Impossible Motherhood is a heartrending and ultimately triumphant testimonial told by a writer looking back on her history of addiction. Abortion has never offered any honest person easy answers. Vilar's dark journey through self-inflicted wounds, compulsive patterns, and historical hauntings is a powerful story of loss and mourning that bravely delves into selfhood, national identity, reproductive freedom, family responsibility, and finally motherhood itself - today, Vilar is the mother of two beautiful children.

Alongside their personal stories, the writers -decorated novelists, poets, and essayists - address the history of the C-section as well as its risks, social inequities, impact on the body, and psychological aftermath. My Caesarean is a heartfelt meditation, offering much-needed comfort through shared experience.

The experience of motherhood is an experience in contradiction. It is commonplace and it is impossible to imagine. It is prosaic and it is mysterious. It is at once banal, bizarre, compelling, tedious, comic, and catastrophic. To become a mother is to become the chief actor in a drama of human...

After nearly forty years of marriage, church ministry, and homeschooling a family of 10, Kendana lost Johnny to a sudden illness. This audio holds the lessons their lives unleashed in a way that feels like The Notebook meets The Shack. Listen to her beautiful, simple words, as Kendana tells of her enduring romance with a farmer boy, their journey through heartbreak, their fierce passion for community, and the surprisingly healing embrace of covenants honored.

In this memoir of her 40 weeks and five days in hell, Andrea Askowitz takes an unflinching look at her pregnant life from struggling with hormones to poor body image to a self imposed exile from family to take us on a ride through the turbulence of single lesbian motherhood. Along the way we meet her liberal parents as they struggle with their daughter's choices, the lover she longs to reconnect with who goes M.I.A. before the pregnancy, the friends who turn out to be no help at all and strangers who offer up some unlikely kindness.

Carrying Hope is the heartfelt and deeply vulnerable story of a pregnancy destined to end in death by the medical world, but for which God had other plans. At a routine scan for Beth’s third child, critical concerns were raised about the baby’s health, and further tests signalled a life-limiting genetic condition. Consultants diagnosed a series of devastating abnormalities and considered the baby too small to survive outside the womb, confronting Beth and her husband with a series of heart-breaking decisions.

"No me ha bajado la regla. Hace dos semanas salí a tomar algo, me lie con las copas y terminé escribiendo a mi ex italiano... ¿Cómo iba yo a saber que unos chupitos de Jäger me pondrían la vida patas arriba?" Así comienza la historia de Valeria. Mientras todo el mundo se volvía loco por encontrar un test covid, ella corría a la farmacia a pedir uno de embarazo. Y luego otro. Para matar el mono, pero también porque no podía creerse que fuera positivo. ¿Puede una llegar a ser buena madre cuando aún no sabe cuidar ni de sí misma?

Beth McRae’s 40 years as a midwife have been packed full of unforgettable moments, from the terrifying experience of witnessing her first birth as a naïve student nurse—in the days when the words birth plan were unheard of and what women wanted was a long way from being part of any plan—to working in one of the most isolated corners of Australia.

This book is about two unlikely friends. One brown, one white; one female, one male; one born in 1970s Britain to Indian immigrant parents, the other arrived from Nazi Germany in 1939, fleeing persecution. This book is about common ground. It is a story of migration, anti-Semitism, racism, family, belonging, grief and resilience. This book is about the past and the present. It is about the mistakes of the 20th century and the uncertain hope of our present moment.

A powerful memoir of medicine, identity, and family secrets from an esteemed ob-gyn as she unravels her grandmother’s mysterious death while reimagining women’s health care from a mobile clinic—for readers of The Beauty in Breaking and The In-Between. In Labor: One Woman’s Work, Dr. Mary...

Until a diagnosis of early menopause in her late twenties, Harriet spent much of her young life feeding neuroses and insecurities with obsessive internet searching (including compulsive googling of exes, prospective partners, and their exes), and indulging in whirlwind ‘parasocial relationships’ (translation: one-sided affairs with celebrities she has never met).

Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Memoir/Biography In this searing and uplifting memoir, a young Black queer woman fresh out of college adopts her baby brother after their incarcerated mother dies, determined to create the kind of family she never had. Growing up, Nikkya...

Teen pregnancy is never easy. When it is the result of pregnancy through rape, the public shame becomes even more unbearable. World-class lifestyle coach and visionary Michelle Graham overcame her fear of the unknown and of those shaming her by holding onto her faith in dark times.

For young single women, every night is Ladies' Night. For Brett Paesel and her friends, Friday happy hour is all they get, if they can wrangle the babysitting. Like most mommies, they support each other through pregnancies, sleep deprivation, and the need to talk about it all. Instead of meeting at the playground, they convene at the local watering hole while sipping Black and Tans and flirting with the cute bartender.

Amity Reed became a midwife to serve women, but the reality of working in overstretched and underfunded NHS maternity services soon shattered her illusions. She’s not alone - for every 30 midwives that train, 29 will leave the profession. Overdue is both the devastating personal story behind the statistics, and a call for change in the NHS.

This program is read by the author. “Haunting, wild, and quiet at once. A shimmering look at motherhood, in all its gothic pain and glory. I could not stop reading.” —Lisa Taddeo, #1 New York Times–bestselling author of Three Women A stressed family, an unplanned pregnancy, and a painful...

When Chitra Ramaswamy discovered she was pregnant for the first time, she longed to listen to something that went above and beyond a biology book or prescriptive manual; something that, instead, got to the heart of the overwhelming, thrilling, and often misrepresented experience she was embarking on. She couldn’t find one. So, she wrote Expecting. Expecting is a creative memoir. Through nine chapters exploring the nine months of gestation and birth, Ramaswamy takes the listener on a physical, intellectual, emotional, literary, and philosophical journey through the landscape of pregnancy.

Aileen Weintraub has been running away from commitment her entire life, hopping from one job and one relationship to the next. When her father suddenly dies, she flees her Jewish Brooklyn community for the wilds of the country, where she unexpectedly falls in love with a man who knows a lot about produce, tractors, and how to take a person down in one jiu-jitsu move. Within months of saying "I do," she's pregnant, life is on track, and then wham! Her doctor slaps a high-risk label on her uterus and sends her to bed for five months.

"Into My Hands" is an intimate and inspiring memoir that delves into the life of a passionate midwife, tracing her path from childhood to her fulfilling career in midwifery. This poignant narrative was born from a transformative moment in the author's early twenties, following a traumatic birth experience with her own daughter. It was then that she resolved to put an end to birth trauma and dedicate her life to supporting women during the sacred journey of childbirth.

Whether offering insight into the rise in home births, the alarming rise in America’s maternal mortality rate, or the history of involuntary sterilization, Karkowsky offers a window into all that pregnancy, labor, and birth can entail - birth and joy, but also challenge and loss - illustrating the complexity of reproductive life and the systems that surround it. With historical insight and journalistic verve, Karkowsky unpacks what is involved for women, for a family, and for us as a society; and explores what’s at risk when these aspects of medicine remain clouded in mystery and misinformation.