A sensitive, wide-ranging, and deeply thoughtful examination of the consequences of abortion bans.
Hackney discusses how the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade transformed the world of high-risk obstetrics.
The author, a medical doctor and a professor of reproductive biology at Case Western Reserve University, calmly and systematically lays out the repercussions for patients and physicians after the Supreme Court’s decision in the 2022 case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Succinctly noting how “medicine, at its most fundamental, lies at the intersection of facts and choices,” he aims to provide the facts necessary to make what he characterizes as impossible decisions. The ramifications of Roe’s defeat occupy three sections. In the first, he explains what’s involved in high-risk obstetrics, discussing uncertainty factors and elucidating physicians’ quandaries and legal risks in cases in which abortion is criminalized. He also describes decision-paralysis among physicians, examines what medical expertise comprises, and addresses why trust in doctors has eroded. Finally, he questions the differing standards of responsibility for physicians and legislators, asking pointedly, “why is the bar set so much lower for democracy than medicine?” Two subsequent sections examine the impact of Dobbs on the status quo, including specific legal, ethical, and care complications for physicians and patients. Hackney emphatically advocates bodily autonomy and physician empathy, rather than moral judgment, but he’s clear about the moral injury that abortion bans inflict. Writing for an educated audience, but not in abstruse language, Hackney effectively engages readers with moving personal anecdotes that vividly dramatize the issues under discussion, often employing pithy expressions; he notes that “risk is the marriage between what we know and what we do not” and that people can “impose abortion bans or uphold…representative government, but not both.” Hackney unambiguously observes that legislative intrusion into medicine affects everyone, not just those who are pregnant. Although this book will undoubtedly be useful to physicians and patients, many general readers will also feel rage and poignant sympathy; above all, the book seems intended for legislators and judges, since it grapples with the real-world difficulties they’ve created.
A sensitive, wide-ranging, and deeply thoughtful examination of the consequences of abortion bans.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2026
ISBN: 9780262054706
Page Count: 208
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 11, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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