Thread

The words 'Caesarean Section' are powerful. They conjure up strong emotions. For some, feelings of doubt, shame, and judgement. For others, a sense of safety, relief, validation, and reassurance. But they are rarely spoken of in the ecstatic tones with which we celebrate so-called natural, or vaginal birth. They are rarely called beautiful or associated with an innate sense of feminine power.

Can Caesarean birth also be magical? Mystical? Awe-inspiring? Knotting its way through history, culture, folklore, and human experience throughout the world, Thread seeks to reframe the Caesarean Section on its journey through myth, magic, and medicine.

Journalist Hannah Marsh blends the medical with the mystical, charting the development of a now common procedure, once a dance between life and death: a last-ditch attempt to save a child whose mother lay dead or dying. Weaving in the arc of her own experience, a journalist's insatiable curiosity, and the stories of women—contemporary, historical, and mythical—who endured, sacrificed, and drove developments, Thread is an unflinching but compassionate examination of a procedure that nowadays remains both pedestrian and miraculous.