Everything Below the Waist ― Why Health Care Needs a Feminist Revolution

An eye-opening, investigative account of the dismal state of women's healthcare in the U.S.

American women visit more doctors, have more surgery, and fill more prescriptions than men. In Everything Below the Waist, Jennifer Block asks: Why is the life expectancy of women today declining relative to women in other high-income countries, and even relative to the generation before them? Block examines several staples of modern women's health care, from fertility technology to contraception to pelvic surgery to miscarriage treatment, and finds that while overdiagnosis and overtreatment persist in medicine writ large, they are particularly acute for women. One third of mothers give birth by major surgery; roughly half of women lose their uterus to hysterectomy.

Feminism turned the world upside down, yet to a large extent the doctors' office has remained stuck in time. Block returns to the 1970s women's health movement to understand how in today's supposed age of empowerment, women's bodies are still so vulnerable to medical control—particularly their sex organs, and as result, their sex lives.

In this urgent book, Block tells the stories of patients, clinicians, and reformers, uncovering history and science that could revolutionize the standard of care, and change the way women think about their health. Everything Below the Waist challenges all people to take back control of their bodies.

Jennifer Block is an award-winning journalist with Type Investigations at The Nation Institute focusing on women's health and the winner of a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant. Block has written for The Washington Post magazine, The Cut, Newsweek, Pacific Standard, Quartz, Reveal, and many others. Her first book Pushed was named a “Best of” by Kirkus Reviews and Library Journal and led a wave of national attention to the crisis in maternity care. Block lives in Brooklyn, New York.