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A review by elly29
Womb: The Inside Story of Where We All Began by Leah Hazard
informative
medium-paced
3.25
Well-researched and very informative, with a mix of history and current research.
The womb has been overlooked and maligned unfairly, often as a result of sexism if not outright misogyny. (Case in point: 15,000 scholarly articles exist for semen, compared to 400 for menstrual blood.) And, she includes a study where female rats had certain reproductive organs removed (uterus only, ovaries only, uterus and ovaries, and a control), and the rats whose uteruses were removed suffered a decline in spatial awareness.
Oh, oh, and I was introduced to the concept of a “gentle Caesarian section,” where there is a cut like in a normal C-section, but the baby emerges slowly and naturally from it, rather than being wholesale pulled out. Sounds like a better alternative to me?
Hazard suffers a bit from the same “so-inclusive-you-lose-meaningful-generalizations” that I found in Alice Chen’s book on asexuality, but it is obviously well-meaning. And, it accomplishes some of its goal: I never would’ve known that there are folks living with Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome (or MRKH, and it’s where the external female organs develop properly, but the uterus itself is underdeveloped or nonexistent).
The womb has been overlooked and maligned unfairly, often as a result of sexism if not outright misogyny. (Case in point: 15,000 scholarly articles exist for semen, compared to 400 for menstrual blood.) And, she includes a study where female rats had certain reproductive organs removed (uterus only, ovaries only, uterus and ovaries, and a control), and the rats whose uteruses were removed suffered a decline in spatial awareness.
Oh, oh, and I was introduced to the concept of a “gentle Caesarian section,” where there is a cut like in a normal C-section, but the baby emerges slowly and naturally from it, rather than being wholesale pulled out. Sounds like a better alternative to me?
Hazard suffers a bit from the same “so-inclusive-you-lose-meaningful-generalizations” that I found in Alice Chen’s book on asexuality, but it is obviously well-meaning. And, it accomplishes some of its goal: I never would’ve known that there are folks living with Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome (or MRKH, and it’s where the external female organs develop properly, but the uterus itself is underdeveloped or nonexistent).