The Birth of Love - Joanna Kavenna

An absorbing and thought-provoking book dealing with the subject of birth and nonconformity from several different angles: a nineteenth-century physician whose campaign against puerperal fever set him so at odds with the medical mainstream that he ended up in a lunatic asylum; a novelist struggling with the social demands of promoting his book; a mother going through the terrifying beauty of the birth - the gory sundering"; and a prisoner being punished for her belief in family relationships and motherhood in a dystopian future where "it is necessary for the survival of the species that we regulate procreation". My timing was a little off on this one - while pregnant for the second time it was unnerving to read about women dying due to doctors failing to wash their hands after autopsies, and then a detailed account of a second birth that is worse than the first... Despite this, there are moments of warmth and positivity in the book, and the concluding paragraphs, describing the initial reactions of the new parents on meeting their baby daughter, are powerfully uplifting.