Growing Season Blog
'Flashback' Tagged Posts

So I recently found an old flash drive, which has all of my writings from my FIRST bachelor’s research thesis in 2006, Reading Midge: Assumptions and Racial Bias in Pregnancy Literature. My research Review of the Literature was, unsurprisingly, largely comprised of pregnancy resource guides. Here’re the thesis and reviews, lightly edited. As a disclaimer, I wrote these over a decade ago, right before starting midwifery school, so some of my views have likely evolved since. Introducing: Flashback Book Reviews. Get it? Flashback? Because they are from my past, but also they were on my Flash drive? Ha. Um.

Reading Midge:
Assumptions and Racial Bias in Pregnancy Literature

June 4, 2018

[Author’s retrospective note: This was my first Bachelors’ Thesis, written in 2006 for my BS in Women’s Studies at Portland State University. The research itself is of course dated, but my arguments are still valid. In the past 12 years, I hope that the state of pregnancy literature has improved, but were I to re-research […]

Tags: Academics, Flashback

Flashback Book Review:
The Mocha Manual to a Fabulous Pregnancy

January 24, 2018

The second in my Flashback Book Review series: Kimberly Seals-Allers’s The Mocha Manual to a Fabulous Pregnancy. NY: Amistad, 2006. This book is awesome. Seals-Allers has filled the much-needed void of pregnancy books for Black women. On the medical side, Black women are at greater risk for certain medical conditions. Personally and socially, there are […]

Tags: Book Reviews, Flashback

Flashback Book Review:
The Girlfriends’ Guide to Pregnancy, or Everything Your Doctor Won’t Tell You

January 6, 2018

Flashback Book Review: Vicki Iovine’s The Girlfriends’ Guide to Pregnancy: or Everything Your Doctor Won’t Tell You. NY: Pocket, 1995. The Girlfriends’ Guide is the pregnancy book I love to hate. However, other people just plain love it, and it unfortunately remains a best seller. This book is organized by topic, such as “Looking the […]

Tags: Book Reviews, Flashback

Toward an Ungendered Childbearing:
Deconstructing Assumptions of Femaleness in Pregnancy and Birth

November 14, 2017

[This essay was originally written in 2006, with last major edits in 2008, and minor edits for language since. Please let me know your thoughts if you notice anything else that needs to be brought into the current decade!] Our society strongly links childbearing with womanhood. There is historical ground for this assumption—most of the […]

Tags: Academics, Flashback