Obstetrix

After Dr. Elizabeth Gwinn is acquitted from performing the last abortion in North Dakota, a pastor stops by to ask how she is settling in to her new position in their community. But that’s a little hard to answer when you’ve been kidnapped and coerced into becoming their cult’s obstetrician. Kidnap/rescue–it’s all semantics. When Sister Sarah introduces Liz, she calls her our NEW doctor, not our new DOCTOR. Liz isn’t the first obstetrician they’d kidnapped, and she doesn’t think they’d needed a replacement obstetrician because they’d let the old one go…The doctor they had before apparently chose not to save Sister Ginny. So her husband Brother Ethan shot that doctor when she said she wouldn’t help. They don’t shoot folks for trying and failing–only for failing to try. The word obstetrics comes from the Latin word obstetrix, which means midwife. Literally, it means to stand opposite, referring to the person who stands opposite to the woman giving birth. (Ironically, the same root word means obstacle.) Obstetrics is the science of waiting, and the most critical skill for a successful obstetrician is patience. The ability to just stand opposite, waiting for a chance to escape, however, is a completely different sort of patience, and not something Liz feels particularly adpet at. Dr. Liz Gwinn has performed over a thousand C-sections in her career as an ob-gyn. She’s overseen many more vaginal deliveries. (She’s done exactly zero personally—in a normal childbirth, the woman delivers the baby; the obstetrician’s just there to stand opposite and catch.) Dr. Gwinn is a single, successful, independent, childfree physician, and while she has never given birth herself, she has performed hysterectomies, rectocele repairs, tubal ligations, oophorectomies. Nothing could have prepared her for this. No one knows where she is, and no one is coming to save her… Make room on your dystopian thriller shelf; a new book baby is making her debut. Naomi Kritzer’s Obstetrix is riveting.