Reading About Women's Reproductive Health: Where to Start
A guide to our Women's Reproductive Health shelf — eighteen anthologies of first-person testimony, from endometriosis and PCOS to IVF, fibroids, loss, and recovery.
October 2, 2024 · By The Editors, Healing Stories Network · 1 min read
Few areas of health carry a longer history of being minimized than women's reproductive health. Pain dismissed as normal, diagnoses that take years, decisions about fertility and surgery made under pressure and grief carried in silence. What the women in these books offer is the thing the system so often withholds: being believed, in detail, by someone who has been there.
Our Women's Reproductive Health shelf holds fifty first-person accounts per volume. Here is the shelf, mapped.
Conditions long dismissed
- Endo Warriors: Endometriosis Stories
- Cyst-er Strength: PCOS Recovery Stories
- Deep Within: Adenomyosis Treatment Stories
- Fibroid Freedom: Treatment Success Stories
- Cyst Dismissed: Ovarian Cyst Treatment Stories
- Breaking Silence: Vulvodynia Treatment Stories
- Cells Changed: Cervical Dysplasia Treatment Stories
Fertility and its journeys
- Test Tube Triumphs: IVF Success Stories
- Insemination Inspiration: IUI Success Stories
- Frozen in Time: Egg Freezing Experience Stories
Pregnancy, loss, and surgery
- Carrying Hope: High-Risk Pregnancy Stories
- After Loss: Miscarriage Recovery Stories
- Misplaced Hope: Ectopic Pregnancy Recovery Stories
- Cut and Courage: C-Section Recovery Stories
- Born Again: VBAC Success Stories
- After the Surgery: Hysterectomy Stories
- Floor Plan: Pelvic Floor Recovery Stories
- Lifted Up: Pelvic Prolapse Treatment Stories
From the Reading Room
Companion pieces include living with endometriosis, PCOS, what IVF is really like, hysterectomy, and menopause and perimenopause.
The whole shelf lives in our Women's Reproductive Health collection; birth-specific reading has its own shelf at Pregnancy & Childbirth.
These books are companion reading, not gynecological advice. If your pain is disrupting your life, that is information worth taking to a clinician who will listen.
The Reading Room publishes personal stories and editorial notes from our press. Everything here is companion reading — never medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. For guidance about your own health, please speak with a qualified clinician.