High Risk: A Doctor's Notes on Pregnancy, Birth, and the Unexpected

“My work offers a window into the darkest and lightest corners of people's lives, into the extremes of human experience,” writes Dr. Chavi Eve Karkowsky in , her timely and unflinching account of working in maternal-fetal medicine - that branch of medicine that concerns high-risk pregnancies. Whether offering insight into the rise in home births, the alarming rise in America's maternal mortality rate, or the history of involuntary sterilization, Karkowsky offers a window into all that pregnancy, labor, and birth can entail - birth and joy, but also challenge and loss - illustrating the complexity of reproductive life and the systems that surround it. With historical insight and journalistic verve, Karkowsky unpacks what is involved for women, for a family, and for us as a society; and explores what's at risk when these aspects of medicine remain clouded in mystery and misinformation.