Filled with appalling stories of malpractice and marginalization, her report will galvanize readers to ask how women can demand better care. Everything Below the Waist is a call to action, insisting '[w]e need clinicians who focus less on controlling women's fertility and more on enhancing our health.' Women of childbearing age in particular should not skip this important and well-researched analysis of a field that holds their lives in its hands.
The book’s upsetting anecdotes, startling statistics and terrific interviews will leave you outraged or simply sad. Block concludes with a call for 'physiological justice' and a new feminist health-care movement. This is the book’s weak spot. Block doesn’t explain how a national movement to help women take back their health care would coalesce. Telling women to question their doctors and research their options sounds like former special counsel Robert Mueller telling Americans to read his 400-plus page report. Good idea! Still, Everything Below the Waist is a must-read for women, especially any woman who might ever need to see a doctor.
In this very readable and well-researched book Jennifer Block provides a wealth of insights and information as to how women are mistreated 'below the waist' by the American medical profession ... This is a very big agenda and, perhaps not surprisingly, not totally realized. Block is much more successful in presenting information on medical mistreatment than she is in demonstrating why mistreatment persists in terms of the power dynamics between doctors and patients, doctors and midwives and doulas, doctors and pharmaceutical companies, doctors and media, doctors and women’s organizations, and feminists of various persuasions. Perhaps this is largely a matter of structuring and focussing the material she has gathered, as there are many intriguing observations and asides on the reasons behind mainstream feminism’s interest, or lack thereof, in women’s health care.
This investigative account will shatter worldviews and everything you think you know about contraceptives, hysterectomies, and childbirth, to name a few essential topics ... Readers will gain a new and thorough understanding of the major issues facing women in the U.S., and why a revolution in women’s health care is urgently needed.
A feminist journalist’s well-documented broadside against a medical system that is still shaped by its patriarchal origins ... Despite the catchy title, this is a dense and serious work packed with important information, highly recommended for health professionals, classes in women’s studies, and any woman who seeks guidance in these issues.
