Dangerous Pregnancies: Mothers, Disabilities, and Abortion in Modern America

"Leslie is also a professor here at the University of Illinois and a person I’m a super fan of. She’s a professor of history, and there are two books of hers I was trying to decide between. There’s this book and then there’s her other book, When Abortion Was a Crime , which is a history of abortion from the 1800s through to the 1970s here in the US (though she mentions some other Western countries). Dangerous Pregnancies is the story of how people came to realize that rubella causes birth defects. It was actually mothers who noticed first. I feel a lot of time is spent talking about how mothers are over-worriers or obsessed with their children or their pregnancies. There are two reasons why it makes sense for them to be. One is that the medical system doesn’t actually care that much about them. In the US we have one of the highest rates of maternal mortality out there. We kill moms on the regular and we don’t seem to feel that bad about it. So there are ways in which it makes sense for pregnant people to really pay attention to their bodies. Also, children are deeply underserved. In the US, we are closing pediatric hospitals, pediatric units and NICUs all over the place because they aren’t profitable enough. So what happens when your child is really, really sick? We have a healthcare system that only cares about the most profitable parts of healthcare, not things that will prevent kids from dying. It took a significant amount of time between moms noticing that if they had rubella while they were pregnant their child might be born blind or die, for people to pay attention. They said it enough times to enough people. The first person who really believed them seems to be a doctor in Australia, Norman Gregg. This book is so powerful because it shows how important it is to respect people when they say, ‘No, something’s wrong. I don’t care what your tests say. I don’t care what your belief is about rubella being a minor disease. This is wrong.’ And it’s because of this that the rubella vaccine was able to be fast-tracked, and implemented as quickly as it was. In my book, I talk about our research on COVID vaccines and menstrual changes and my lab’s principles around the art of noticing. This book really shows, in so many ways, why it’s so important to pay attention to what a patient says. No, but there is a connection to health, to medicine. What moves me about this book is the incredible detail, compassion and attention that Dr. Reagan puts on all these parents who said, ‘No, my kid deserves something better. And I deserve something better because I don’t want this to happen again.’ Mothers were saying, ‘Nobody is protecting me. I’m going to get rubella and my kid is going to die.’ For me, I also see a connection with our current pandemic. We’ve stopped caring about how many people we’re killing. If you look at the death rates, they’re still very high. If you look at the infection rates, they’re still very high. And yet people are acting like they don’t care. Every person who doesn’t care and goes indoors unmasked risks transmitting the disease to a pregnant person, or an immune-compromised person. It’s perpetuating a pandemic and incredible harm. And yet, we’ve all decided we’re okay with it. I still mask indoors everywhere; I still can’t wrap my mind around the fact that we’ve decided we don’t care about our fellow human beings. We now know that COVID during pregnancy could cause microcephaly in babies. We now have two cases at the University of Miami showing that there is a link. We also know that getting COVID while you’re pregnant increases your risk of miscarriage, stillbirth, preeclampsia and intra-uterine growth restriction. We’re exposing pregnant people every day to a disease that causes harm to the parent and causes harm to the fetus. We’ve known about this since 2020 and nobody gives a shit. We’ve known for three years what we’re doing to pregnant people and we don’t care. That’s why I’m curious when I look at this book, and how we actually cared. We fought to come up with a vaccine to stop transmission of rubella to protect pregnant people and fetuses and children. Today, we don’t have that for COVID. Most pregnant people don’t even know that every time they go out unmasked or the people around them don’t bother masking, they are exposing themselves to the risk of stillbirth, miscarriage, preeclampsia, intrauterine growth restriction and microcephaly. So yes, my book is about periods. But it’s also about what it means to care about people. And that I think we should care about people more than we do."