The Ghosts of the Delivery Room

Corinne Cordasco-Pak reviews Erica Stern’s “Frontier: A Memoir and a Ghost Story.”

By Corinne Cordasco-PakOctober 25, 2025

• Memoir & Essay

• SF

EARLY IN THE SUMMER, as I shuttle my toddler from day care to splash pads and remove outgrown clothes from his dresser, a news story gains momentum. In a hospital in Atlanta, just a few miles from our home, a 30-year-old pregnant woman—Adriana Smith, a nurse and mother to a seven-year-old—has been declared brain-dead but remains on life support. While a ventilator is preserving the functions of her body, hospital officials are really the ones keeping her alive, acting in accordance with Georgia HB 481, also known as the Living Infants Fairness and Equality (LIFE) Act, a “heartbeat bill” that went into effect shortly after Roe v. Wade (1973) was overturned in 2022. At almost nine weeks pregnant, Smith sought treatment for pain, later revealed to be blood clots in her brain, a pregnancy complication, though the doctors failed to diagnose this. When her pain worsened, she was taken to the hospital, where doctors made the decision to keep her on life support until her fetus reached viability, without consideration of her or her family’s wishes.

I am aware of this case as I begin reading Erica Stern’s Frontier: A Memoir and a Ghost Story (2025), a research-filled work of speculative fiction and personal essay that details the author’s experience with birth complications. The events of Stern’s life are mirrored by a Wild West ghost story that shares some elements of her experience and deviates from others, a format that allows the book to explore two seemingly contradictory ideas: that pregnancy and birth are much safer now than ever before and that, even with all the medical care and other support available, pregnancy and birth are still far from safe.

Frontier is more than a memoir and a ghost story, though. It is also a deep exploration of the ways childbirth has evolved to fit the shape of the modern world, dominated by patriarchy and capitalism. It’s full of research about the history of prenatal care and birth work, and especially the shifting of the field from the purview of midwives and other women to a domain governed by men and formal medical institutions.

The research included in the text is expansive. Stern includes a Victorian birthing text that explores the etymology of the word “pelvis” (from the Greek for “bowl”). She also examines the careers of figures such as William Smellie, who called himself a “male midwife” and was said to dress as a woman in order to sneak into birthing rooms, and James Marion Sims, whose invention of the speculum and other groundbreaking work (much still relevant to modern obstetrics and gynecology) were the results of cruel experiments performed on enslaved Black women.

If Stern’s book sounds like nothing you’ve ever encountered before, that’s likely because it is. Its methodological approach is situated somewhere on the intersecting axes of science and intuition, religion and superstition. Frontier’s fragmented, almost overstuffed form offers a rigorous exploration of birth, itself an experience that defies categorization. In my own limited social circle, I’ve heard friends describe almost every type of event, including hospital births (with and without pain relief), home births (intentional and unintentional), birthing-center births, emergency inductions and C-sections, orgasmic births, free births, VBACs, traumatic births, and joyful births—each as true as the next. Frontier acknowledges the existence and implications of all of these types of births while simultaneously finding ways to delve deeper into (and often critique) birth as an industry and a culture.

The story starts on familiar territory: the narrator, heavily pregnant and on her way to the hospital, reassures her cab driver that she is not in labor—although (spoiler alert) she is soon to discover that she very much is. By the second paragraph, however, Stern as narrator is already stepping out of the earliest scenes of her own birth experience and into her splintered, tangled narrative. “This is how women learn to narrate their lives,” she explains, reshaping the morning when her birth story begins, making its deeply personal events into something almost anecdotal, curated for public consumption.

When, over the course of the birth, things begin to go awry, the narrative splinters further. We make stops in the deep-rooted capitalism of the modern baby-gear marketplace, as the narrator and her husband struggle to comprehend the aptly named buybuy BABY. As the delivery room becomes the scene of something more intense, the doctor in attendance strips off her sweater and produces forceps (“Imagine a set of sterile salad tongs”), which I imagine her clicking together. Stern explains that forceps were brought into the birthing space by male doctors as an alternative to the dangerous use of kitchen implements, which often maimed or dismembered infants.

As the baby leaves the narrator’s body—alive yet somehow wrong—the narrator vacates too, taking up residence in the vent above the delivery table and watching the aftermath from afar. And then, in a grand and final gesture of separation, we leave this story altogether to attend the earliest moments of a different birth: a pioneer woman, laboring crouched in an outhouse, whose experience is similarly difficult. Unassisted by the lifesaving care provided by doctors in a hospital, the woman and her child both die. Like Stern, who disassociates in a moment of great trauma, her Wild West counterpart also leaves her own body, watching the aftermath of her birth from afar.

This second narrative offers a powerful reshaping of Stern’s story. In including a ghost story, something to be feared and whispered about, Stern captures the silence that still seems to surround the most difficult parts of birth. Laboring in the hot, stinking outhouse, the ghost mother hides from her husband. “I cannot allow him to see me in this degraded state, so returning home is no option,” she thinks, eventually making the journey to a midwife’s home when she cannot be alone any longer.

The scene reminded me of many of the whispered conversations between women in my life: the pregnancy losses, the underresearched menstrual and menopausal symptoms, the ignored pleas for medical attention. This privacy is both broken and enforced by women; once, when I complained to a friend about my pregnancy symptoms, she told me that her mother was of the opinion that women shouldn’t know too much about pregnancy before they experience it or else they might be too afraid to go through with it. Similarly, a stranger advises the narrator to embrace the pain of a natural birth (which was bad enough to cause ongoing nightmares) in order to feel a “crucial moment” of connection with her baby.

Frontier breaks this code of suffering in silence over and over again. It doesn’t look away from the fear, the messiness. It is a book that talks plainly about the things that have long been hidden, the things women are expected to endure silently and bravely. In Frontier, every deviation in the story is a direct path back to its heart—the fact that, despite its inherent risks, we still choose to go through the pregnancy process.

Though Frontier starts out as a book about giving birth, it becomes a story about stepping into motherhood. Stern treats these as distinct events, exploring them equally in both the real-life and speculative narratives.

In an early chapter, the narrator, now in active labor, asks a friend to bring her “go bag” to the hospital, wanting the camera she packed to capture images in the recovery suite. But this rite of passage never comes. In the days after the birth, the narrator recovers separately in a windowless room, consigned to navigating her postpartum body without her baby’s presence, as her son stays hooked up to a cooling cap doctors hope will mitigate the effects of the brain injury he sustained during birth. She visits him there, sitting beside his bassinet as she awaits a formal diagnosis and treatment plan. Her son does not yet fully belong to her; he is still “a baby of the hospital.”

As her son’s condition improves, the narrator embarks on her own milestones of motherhood, though they aren’t the happy postpartum pictures she had hoped for. Discharged from the hospital, she stays in a nearby hotel before returning home, her son’s future still uncertain. And yet, she still exists as a mother; she begins to accumulate baby gear, including a hands-free pumping bra that eases the task of procuring breast milk for her son. The subsequent chapters include meditations on the biblical narrative of Jonah (whose name her son shares), the abstract optimistic advice of her prenatal yoga class, discussions of texts on childhood development, explorations of Jewish religious thought and mysticism, and an exposition of the wonder and mystery of the narrator’s childhood experience in the musical Godspell—all interspersed with the new rhythms of pumping milk, visiting Jonah, and waiting for answers.

Meanwhile, in the Wild West scenes, the ghost mother goes in search of her ghost son. “I’ll find you. I’ll find you. I’ll find you,” she promises, and we follow her on her search, through the preparation of her own body for burial and her son’s autopsy. These scenes are particularly heartbreaking, filled with love and longing. The search for her baby eventually leads her into the future, where her husband’s second wife has delivered a son. The ghost mother believes that her stillborn child has taken the form of a dybbuk, a spirit that co-inhabits the body of his living half brother. She hovers over the infant in his cradle, wondering if he can sense her presence as he reaches his tiny fists into the air; she also observes the new wife’s transition into motherhood, which is far from straightforward.

Back in the hospital NICU, Jonah opens his eyes. “He is here. He is a person,” the narrator says, in contrast to the aftermath of delivery when she describes her son as “born, but not completely.” It is one of the book’s many moments of rebirth, a hopeful moment powered by all the faith and superstition and science the author calls upon. Unlike their Wild West counterparts, Jonah and his mother are still becoming themselves, mother and baby, individually and in relation to each other. She can hold him without fear of disrupting the systems that sustain him, change his diapers without consulting the nurses, bathe him.

Eventually, Jonah is well enough to go home. Crossing the hospital threshold for the first time with her baby, the narrator reflects:

There are now more moments of birth than I can count. Delivery and naming and the first time I held Jonah and the day he opened his eyes […] and more in between that I’ve lost track of. No matter how many times he’s born, he still does not seem completely mine. Maybe this time it will stick?

In the Wild West, meanwhile, the ghost mother follows her replacement as she puts her baby in the care of her husband and leaves her house alone, on a quest to cross her own unnamed thresholds of motherhood. Back at the cabin, the ghost mother hovers above her once-husband and the dybbuk baby, who meets her gaze. “If I were embodied,” she says, “and if he had his own body instead of tenancy in the body of another, I know that […] we would have looked into each other, truly, for the first time, like a real mother and son.”

Frontier is not a long book. It is much smaller than What to Expect When You’re Expecting, a well-known 1984 text whose optimism is upended by this tale of a birth experience that defies all expectation. (In fact, upon returning home from the hospital with Jonah, the narrator throws the book out.) And yet Frontier contains an impressive breadth of knowledge that explores childbirth and its aftermath from all sides, making space for history and contradiction and heartbreak. It is a book that speaks to the modern idea of a safe birth as something guaranteed—or, maybe more accurately, as something that can be purchased, so long as you have good medical insurance and the budget for expensive baby gear.

What does motherhood mean to the women of the past and present who died as a result of their efforts to bring new life into the world, or to the ones who don’t have a choice in whether or not they will undertake such dangers? What does it mean, for the mothers and children who receive lifesaving medical treatments, that many of those advances were tempered in the suffering of others? What does it mean to continue to choose to bring children into a world that is, in many ways, growing less safe for children and their mothers? These are not easy questions to answer, but surely the answers are not going to be found in expensive strollers or Instagram photos taken in hospital recovery suites or books about pregnancy written with great authority by men who will never experience it.

Stern’s story is a welcome and necessary contribution to the conversation around birth at a time when the dangers of bearing children feel especially pressing. In a world where reproductive rights and medical care are threatened, and national headlines detail the suffering of women (disproportionately women of color like Adriana Smith) whose rights to their own bodies have been stripped in service of tendentious narratives about motherhood, Stern provides a critical voice, pushing past misguided assumptions to tell her story in a way that allows it to be heard. The result is a book that holds the holiness and the dangers of childbirth in tension, making a strong case that everyone to whom birth is relevant—which is to say, everyone—should do the same. In Frontier, childbirth is beautiful but not sanitized. It is deeply personal yet universal. It is dangerous—wildly, tragically, life-alteringly dangerous—and yet still hopeful.