Oh I deeply enjoyed this. It's not without its problems: the history Freidenfelds presents is VERY white, something she kind of elides by describing it as "middle class" (even though, as she notes in her footnotes, many of the birthing and parenting concerns and goals she writes about here transcend class and racial lines) and yes ooo boy is it cis-centric in its use of "woman" to describe the experiences of all pregnant people (not that I expect much better from most scholarship surrounding pregnancy.)

What pushed it to five stars for me was the number of conversations I struck up about this book as I was reading it; it's a book that pushed me to talk about the changes over time, to discuss how bonkers current practices are (me @ people keeping their pregnancy tests: you peed on that???) and how the challenges of grief, while still obviously mattering a great deal, are also constructed in our current moment by historical and material forces (the push to have testing that detects ever-earlier "pregnancies" that are miscarried when historically they wouldn't be noticed at all,) as well as the pressures to "bond" earlier and earlier. It's the kind of history writing that I love the best, where it's not a progressive narrative of things getting better and better but reveals in fact where we might be off-track, and allowing us to imagine alternate ways of being that draw on the way people lived differently in the past.

So, four and a half stars for being compelling and interesting enough that I couldn't seem to stop talking about it with people, despite its obvious (and pretty glaring) flaws around incorporating the historical experiences of Black and Indigenous folks as well as other people of color (we'll just skip over the troubling history of the pill I guess?) Good for recommending to your white mom if you, like me, have one. ( )