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Is giving birth in America unbearable?
That’s the implication of a new book by New York magazine journalist Irin Carmon, which tracks five women’s perilous pregnancies to reveal how maternal health in this country is riddled with malpractice. Two of the women die during childbirth. One is failed by an overworked anesthesiologist who should have been dismissed years earlier. The book creates a dizzying sense that having a baby in the United States is harrowingly dangerous. Its title is Unbearable.
The book exposes real cruelty, from the small humiliations inflicted by hospitals that treat women as potential lawsuits, to preventable deaths. America’s maternal mortality rate is shocking: In 2023—the most recent year for which there’s reliable data—almost 19 in 100,000 women died in childbirth. (The equivalent figure in the UK was 12.67.) Among black women, the rate was 50 in 100,000. Every American should demand better care for mothers—and be grateful to Carmon for her reporting.
But she is anxious about a side effect of her book. In an article she wrote for The New York Times to promote the book, she admits to wondering, sometimes, if “talking honestly about what’s messy and painful and unfair about pregnancy and parenting can make choosing it seem almost absurd.” And in this sentence, she captures what is, right now, one of the left’s fundamental challenges. We live in a country where birth rates are plunging, even though the majority of young Americans still say they want children. Yet Democrats seem incapable of presenting a positive vision of pregnancy, childbirth, or parenting.
