Invisible Labor

The Untold Story of the Cesarean Section

Ecco, 2024

When Rachel Somerstein had an unplanned C-section with her first child, the experience was anything but “routine.” A series of errors by her clinicians led to a real-life nightmare: surgery without anesthesia. The ensuing complications left her traumatized and searching for answers.

In the United States, one in three babies is born via C-section. While, in most cases, the procedure is safe, it is not without significant consequences, many of which affect people of color disproportionately. With C-sections all but invisible in popular culture and pregnancy guides, new mothers are often left to navigate these obstacles on their own.

In Invisible Labor, Rachel Somerstein weaves personal narrative and journalism with medical, social, and cultural history to reveal the operation’s surprising evolution, from its early practice on enslaved women to its excessive promotion by modern medical practitioners. She uncovers current-day failures of the medical system, showing how pregnant women’s agency
is regularly disregarded by providers who, motivated by fear of litigation or a hospital’s commitment to efficiency, make far-reaching and deeply personal decisions on behalf of their patients. She also examines what prevailing maternal and medical attitudes toward C-sections tell us about American culture.

Candid and illuminating, Invisible Labor lifts the veil on C-sections so that people can make choices on pregnancy and surgical birth with greater knowledge about its risks, benefits, and alternatives. With deep feeling and authority, Somerstein offers support to others who have had difficult or traumatic birth experiences, as well as hope for new forms of reproductive justice.

PRAISE FOR INVISIBLE LABOR

“A decade after my first C-section, Invisible Labor helped me process wounds I thought were healed. Rachel Somerstein looks directly into our bodies and body politic, revealing the gender and racial power dynamics that make the C-section America’s most common surgery. Rigorously and lovingly reported, Invisible Labor is a gift, both long overdue and right on time.” — Angela Garbes, author of Like a Mother and Essential Labor

“Somerstein lifts the surgical drape on the cesarean and explores what it really is, what it has meant for mothers, and how it has been weaponized. The operation affects women most deeply, physically and psychologically, but it ripples out in ways that the ever-expanding literature on modern maternity care has not fully examined and that belie the hidden bikini scar. With fascinating medical history, trenchant cultural analysis, and unflinching personal testimony, Invisible Labor is an important, accessible contribution.” — Jennifer Block, journalist and author of Everything Below the Waist and Pushed

“Rachel Somerstein’s Invisible Labor is astonishing for parents—like me—who never even thought to ask questions about the most important experience of their lives. She has done that rare thing that the very best books do: she has made the unseen seen. And if there’s any justice in this world, this book will change systems.”
— Rachel Louise Snyder, author of Women We Buried, Women We Burned and No Visible Bruises