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LARA FREIDENFELDS

Historian of Health, Reproduction, and Parenting in America

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    • All Posts
    • abortion
    • assisted reproduction
    • birth control
    • body image
    • dance
    • disability
    • family
    • health
    • law
    • menstruation
    • miscarriage
    • parenting
    • pregnancy
    • sex
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    Lara Freidenfelds
    • Oct 14, 2020

    What About Men’s Reproductive Health?

    In her latest book, GUYnecology: The Missing Science of Men’s Reproductive Health, sociologist Rene Almeling asks why all the public heal...
    24 views0 comments
    Pregnancy and Miscarriage on Social Media
    Lara Freidenfelds
    • Oct 6, 2020

    Pregnancy and Miscarriage on Social Media

    New Metaphors to Make Miscarriages Easier to Talk About, and Easier to Bear For someone who has been trying for a pregnancy, it is natura...
    44 views0 comments
    Lara Freidenfelds
    • Jul 28, 2020

    An Incisive History of Cesarean Section

    This is a pre-publication draft of my review of Jacqueline Wolf’s Cesarean Section: An American History of Risk, Technology, and Conseque...
    109 views0 comments
    Lara Freidenfelds
    • Jan 27, 2020

    The emergence of the home pregnancy test

    With the arrival of cheaper and more user-friendly home pregnancy tests in the 1980s, women were able to confirm their pregnancies earlie...
    21 views0 comments
    Lara Freidenfelds
    • Jan 2, 2020

    8 myths about pregnancy and miscarriage

    In the decade and a half that I spent researching my book “The Myth of the Perfect Pregnancy: A History of Miscarriage in America,” I dis...
    55 views0 comments
    Lara Freidenfelds
    • Jan 1, 2020

    How Did We Get Here? An Interview with Lara Freidenfelds (by Shannon Withycombe)

    Lara Freidenfelds’s new book, The Myth of the Perfect Pregnancy: A History of Miscarriage in America, explores the history of pregnancy a...
    11 views0 comments
    Lara Freidenfelds
    • Dec 31, 2019

    Making Room for Miscarriage

    After I miscarried my first pregnancy, I quickly realized that I needed a historical perspective to make sense of this shockingly unexpec...
    32 views0 comments
    Lara Freidenfelds (Admin)
    • Oct 23, 2019

    In Vitro Fertilization: From Science Fiction to Reality to History

    It was not that long ago that “test tube babies” only existed in science fiction. I remember my shock when, in 2007, one of my students a...
    22 views0 comments
    Lara Freidenfelds (Admin)
    • Oct 21, 2019

    Women Breaking the Silence on Miscarriage

    I am glad to see so many women willing to break the silence on miscarriage. I am a historian, and I spent 15 years researching my forthco...
    11 views0 comments
    Journey Into Mothering with Historian Sarah Knott
    Lara Freidenfelds (Admin)
    • Jul 23, 2019

    Journey Into Mothering with Historian Sarah Knott

    In Mother Is a Verb, Sarah Knott takes her reader on a historian’s journey into motherhood. It is a sort of train travelogue, riding alon...
    10 views0 comments
    Lara Freidenfelds (Admin)
    • Jun 26, 2019

    A Tale of Two Midwives across Four Centuries

    What happens when the person who delivers most of the babies in her community is arrested? This is a tale of two midwives, separated by n...
    7 views0 comments
    Lara Freidenfelds (Admin)
    • Jun 3, 2019

    This is Not a Culture of Life, This is a Culture of Un-Death

    Last week at a Vatican conference on abortion, Pope Francis “argued that children who were not expected to live long after birth deserved...
    20 views0 comments
    Coming Home: How Midwives Changed Birth (review)
    Lara Freidenfelds (Admin)
    • Apr 25, 2019

    Coming Home: How Midwives Changed Birth (review)

    It’s a rare academic history book that tempts me to binge-read.  Wendy Kline’s Coming Home: How Midwives Changed Birth is one of those sp...
    10 views0 comments
    Lara Freidenfelds (Admin)
    • Nov 16, 2018

    Washington Post op-ed: What Michelle Obama’s Miscarriage Teaches Us About Modern Pregnancy

    “In her new book, “Becoming,” Michelle Obama reveals that she miscarried her first pregnancy, and went on to conceive her two daughters b...
    11 views0 comments
    Lara Freidenfelds (Admin)
    • Nov 1, 2018

    Church Discipline and Miscarriage Mismanagement at Catholic Hospitals

    Quick — is your nearest hospital affiliated with the Catholic Church? This is a question I would not have been able to answer during my tw...
    14 views0 comments
    Lara Freidenfelds (Admin)
    • Jun 28, 2018

    How the abortion debate has skewed Americans’ understanding of pregnancy

    What led a Walgreeens pharmacist to deny a woman her prescription. Read the rest at the Washington Post #conscienceclause #misoprostol
    12 views0 comments
    Lara Freidenfelds (Admin)
    • May 2, 2018

    The Obstetrician Who Cried “White Privilege”

    In December of 2016, I wrote an essay for Nursing Clio called Nurse-Midwives are With Women, Walking a Middle Path to a Safe and Rewardin...
    7 views0 comments
    Lara Freidenfelds (Admin)
    • Nov 17, 2017

    Let’s Question All Versions of the Myth of Perfect Motherhood

    I would call it a “pet peeve,” but the stakes are higher: I can’t stand policy arguments based on inaccurate or misrepresented historical...
    9 views0 comments
    Lara Freidenfelds (Admin)
    • Dec 23, 2016

    Nurse-Midwives are With Women, Walking a Middle Path to a Safe and Rewarding Birth

    In childbirth politics as in all politics, extreme viewpoints make the news, and sensible centrists are ignored. A couple of years ago, R...
    1 view0 comments
    Lara Freidenfelds (Admin)
    • Aug 25, 2016

    Playwright Alice Eve Cohen Asks Us to Reconsider What We Think We Know about Pregnancy and Motherhoo

    “What makes a mother real?” asks writer and performer Alice Eve Cohen in her newly-published play, What I Thought I Knew. In 1999, Cohen ...
    2 views0 comments
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