A line from the poem “People” by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, read as a teenager and  never forgotten, permeates this and all my books: “Not people die but worlds die in them.” The knowledge that each human being is huge, complex, unique, and of infinite worth guides my writing.

Researching in the obstetrics-gynecology and reproductive technology literature for my books, I saw women reduced to minuscule aspects of themselves in which they were no longer recognizable. A woman was a “reproductive vehicle,” “clinical material,” in menopause “living decay,” in the AIDS epidemic a “vector of disease.” I knew this was not so. I knew that women were richer and more powerful beings than those male medicine portrayed us as. 

For The Hidden Malpractice, I studied the current obstetrical and gynecological literature; interviewed more than 80 physicians, patients, sociologists, nurses, midwives; and conducted historical research on female physicians in the United States and the 19th century Popular Health Movement using collections of documents at the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College, Harvard University and Tulane Medical School.