This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. A new book by Portland Dr. Mary Fariba Afseri opens with a vivid image of her trying to fit a red gynecology table in the back of a mini cooper. It's 2021, and she's 15 years into her career as a board-certified OBGYN, who walked away from a traditional practice, bought a 31-foot

RV, taught herself to drive it, and turned it into one of the country's only mobile gynecology clinics.

She parks it in communities with few health care options, undocumented families, survivors of medical

trauma, people who need reproductive care and have

nowhere else to go since the landmark Dobbs decision in 2022 overturned Roe v. Wade. But the RV

is only part of the story. Dr. Afseri is the daughter of Iranian immigrants who left Iran

ahead of the Islamic Revolution when she was

three years old. She's named after her grandmother, Marie, a woman she never met who died

attempting an illegal abortion in Iran, leaving behind four young children. That law shaped her

family and the doctor's career. Her new book, Labor, One Woman's Work,

comes at a moment when abortion access has been stripped from millions of American women.

Maternal mortality is rising, and OBGYNs are leaving states where they can no longer

practice medicine without fear of prosecution. Dr. Aferi, welcome to fresh air. Thank you, Tanya. I'm so

happy to be here. I want to start inside of this RV clinic because you had a thriving practice.

You were a surgeon. You delivered babies. By every measure you had built, really exactly what every doctor is supposed

to build. So what was it about this day-to-day reality of medicine that made you think, I need

to blow this all up and start over in a parking lot, basically? I think there's a perception out

there that OBGYNs live in a world of celebration, bringing a new life, welcoming babies.

And that's not all entirely false.

That's true.

That's a huge part of my motivation for going into this line of work.

But when you're practicing in and out where you're actually caring for people who need comprehensive reproductive care.

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