Winner of the Moore Prize for Human Rights Writing
'Moving, kind, eye-opening, terrifying and inspirational. This book will stay with me for years.' Adam Kay, author of This Is Going to Hurt
In 2014, Dr Benjamin Black arrived in Sierra Leone to work as an obstetrician in a country with one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world. Within weeks, the Ebola epidemic was spreading rapidly across West Africa, transforming an already fragile healthcare system into the frontline of an unprecedented crisis.
From maternity wards to Ebola Treatment Centres, Black was confronted with impossible decisions: how do you provide emergency care when physical contact itself can be deadly? How do you protect healthcare workers without abandoning the women who desperately need them? And what happens to pregnancy and childbirth when an epidemic overwhelms almost every aspect of medical care?
Drawing on his experiences with Médecins Sans Frontières, Belly Woman takes readers behind the headlines to meet the women, families and healthcare workers living through the epidemic. Black writes with remarkable honesty about maternal death, reproductive healthcare and the realities of humanitarian medicine, but also about courage, camaraderie and the moments of hope that persist in the midst of crisis.
Looking from Ebola to his later experiences providing maternity care during COVID-19, Black asks what these outbreaks reveal about inequality, global health and the choices we make when healthcare systems are pushed to their limits.
Urgent, compassionate and deeply human, Belly Woman is an extraordinary medical memoir about caring for women in some of the most challenging circumstances imaginable.