Hello, everyone, and welcome to Fresh Take from What Fresh Hell Laughing in the Face of Motherhood.

This is Margaret.

And this is Amy. Today we're talking to Irin Carmon.

She is an award-winning senior correspondent at New York Magazine, where she covers gender, law, politics, and more.

She is the co-author of the New York Times bestseller, Notorious RBG, and the author of a new book which we'll be talking about today, Unbearable, Five Women and the Perils of Pregnancy in America. Welcome, Erin.

Thank you so much for having me. Let's start with a quote from the introduction of the book. For much of American history and medicine,

artificial categories of good and bad pregnancies, celebrated or stigmatized, wanted or unwanted,

medicalized or, quote, unquote, natural, healthy or unhealthy, planned or unplanned,

have obscured the true complexities of people's lives. So so much of this book

is a portrait of different ways people come to pregnancy, different experiences that people have with

pregnancy. You talk about your own pregnancy in the book. Tell us what brought you to write this book.

So as a reporter for about 12 years before I started writing the book, I was focusing on reproduction in America.

Mostly in the beginning, I started out covering legal paddles around abortion.

Then I had the opportunity to report all over the country at how different kinds of laws and structures were affecting people's actual lives.

And I was always interested in all the different kinds of experiences of pregnancy, not just people in a situation where they want to end it.

But we know that that was this huge fault line in American medicine and law and politics. And I was really interested in all

the different feelings that people had about it, no matter where they stood, and the fact that

everyday people's lives were getting caught in this. But it wasn't until I got pregnant myself

that I really felt that both the intimate potential violation of somebody making a decision

for you about your pregnancy and also an extreme sense of solidarity with people in all other

situations of pregnancy. For me, I was so excited to be pregnant. I had a blessedly short bout with infertility. I got pregnant through IUI. This is not in the book, but just in terms of context, I was really excited to be pregnant when the time was right for me. And I had an easy pregnancy, a textbook pregnancy. And then the world shut down for COVID. So I was about halfway through my pregnancy in March 2020 in New York City and the epicenter. And as a reporter, I started covering the things that were happening in hospitals in those early panicked days of COVID. So I was scared that I was going to have to give birth for the first time by myself. I was going to have a mask. With the first part,

did not end up being true for me the second part. I think I ripped off my mask at a certain point,

...