‘Pain should not be the price of birth’

There is something harrowingly precise about the project of The Retrievals. From its first season, which unspooled like a carefully restrained scream, chronicling how dozens of women endured egg retrievals without pain medication because a nurse siphoned off their fentanyl, the podcast has been fixated on a single, profound theme: the systemic refusal to take women’s pain seriously. This isn’t just a medical failure; it is a cultural design flaw, an institutional pattern of disbelief braided through hospital policy, legal frameworks, and the stories we tell ourselves about what it means to suffer in a female body. Season 2 tightens the lens, turns its gaze toward the operating room, and stares directly into the blinding light of the most common major surgery on earth: the C-section.

With nearly 1.2 million performed annually in the United States alone, Caesarean sections are considered routine, safe, even convenient. But as host Susan Burton makes disturbingly clear, “routine” is not synonymous with “humane,” and “safe” does not mean “without agony.” Season 2 is built around the story of Clara, a woman who experienced searing, vivid, unmedicated pain during her C-section – not due to negligence or malpractice in the traditional sense, but due to a cascade of dismissals that began the moment she expressed doubt, fear, sensation. Clara worked at the hospital where her C-section happened, and so was begging her colleagues, her friends, to listen to her as she told them she could feel every touch, every cut, she could feel her organs literally being lifted out of her body. But the surgeon claimed she was just “anxious” and refused to give her general anaesthetic. Her body, like so many women’s, was treated as if it had lost credibility the second she became pregnant.

This is not an isolated failure. Season 2 of The Retrievals builds a case that the unspoken truth of childbirth is not just that it is painful, but that women are expected to endure that pain quietly – and that when they don’t, the institutions meant to protect them too often react not with concern but disbelief. Pain during caesareans isn’t rare – one recent study, the first of its kind, found that 8 per cent of patients feel significant pain during C-section surgeries. That’s 100,000 people per year in the U.S. alone. And yet, until now, this statistic didn’t exist. It wasn’t just under-researched, it was uncounted, unspoken, invisible. That silence isn’t accidental. It is foundational.

Season 1 of The Retrievals used the frame of true crime to explore the institutional complicity that let Yale’s fertility clinic ignore its patients’ screams. But the story was never really about the nurse who stole the drugs. It was about the way women learn to doubt their own senses when the people in power tell them their pain is “normal,” “expected,” “in their heads.” It was about the mathematics of credibility, that even when 40 women expressed intense pain during their procedures, they weren’t deemed credible enough to overcome the patriarchal assumption that women can’t be trusted to know what’s happening in their own bodies. Season 2 doesn’t rely on the whodunnit structure. It doesn’t need to. The villain here is the broader system, a vast, entangled network of cultural expectations and medical orthodoxy that begins by dismissing discomfort and ends in the normalisation of suffering.

There is a name for this: gendered medical gaslighting. The phenomenon by which women’s descriptions of their own bodily experiences are met with scepticism, minimisation, or redefinition by clinicians. We see it in the diagnosis of endometriosis – or rather, the chronic lack of diagnosis, as women with the condition wait, on average, seven to ten years to be believed. We see it in obstetrics, where pain is so baked into the expectation of pregnancy that deviations from standard suffering are rarely flagged as urgent, even when they indicate surgical failure. We see it in the psychiatric flattening of postpartum distress, where women are prescribed mood stabilisers instead of being allowed to articulate rage, grief, or trauma. We see it in the lack of medical research into women’s bodies, where everything from drug trials to anatomical studies has historically privileged male physiology as the default, rendering female biology an afterthought – messy, hormonal, inconvenient. We see it in the way pain is gendered from childhood, girls told they’re dramatic, hysterical, too sensitive, setting the stage for a lifetime of internalised doubt and outward dismissal. And we see it most chillingly in the spaces where pain intersects with power – in birth, in fertility treatments, in surgery – where women are most vulnerable, most in need of care, and yet most likely to be told they are exaggerating, misremembering, mistaken. This is not accidental. It is a system functioning exactly as designed – one that mistrusts women’s voices, that disciplines their pain into silence, and that demands they smile through the incision.

We see it in fiction, too, because sometimes it is only through stories that the full scope of silence can be illuminated. In Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s book-turned-limited series Fleishman Is in Trouble, Brodesser-Akner fictionalises her own experience for the character of Rachel, whose birth trauma and indeed life is at first an afterthought in the story – a footnote in her husband Toby’s narration. At the beginning of the story, Rachel has disappeared, leaving her ex Toby feeling bitter and angry at her irresponsibility as he becomes a single father for the summer (while still managing to date.) But then the story flashes back to their marriage, the birth of their first child, and we learn what really happened: a doctor broke her water without her consent, a violation that triggers a spiral of postpartum depression, marital breakdown, and emotional collapse. Though Rachel screamed for help, Toby offered her no support, no sympathy, and she can’t find help or understanding elsewhere. Everywhere she looks is told her pain is too inconvenient, too ambiguous, too difficult to categorise. In the book, Rachel attends a support group for sexual trauma, looking for some support but is told she does not qualify. Her experience is not “technically” assault. The violence that happens in delivery rooms is often bureaucratic, legal, sanitised – and yet it can leave psychic wounds just as deep. Later, Rachel attends a spa which offers ‘screaming therapy’ and we see all her pain and anger and grief pour out of her – only for her new romantic interest to leave her, claiming she’s no longer “fun”.

There is something punishing in the way women are taught to process pain – as character-building, as inevitable, as something they should metabolise privately lest they inconvenience others. In Season 2 of The Retrievals, we hear women describe the electric horror of feeling incisions during surgery, the helplessness of being strapped down and conscious, screaming while clinicians look at monitors. And still, they are told, the procedure went fine. The baby is healthy. Everything is okay. Except it isn’t.

In American Horror Story: Delicate, the surreal is used to dramatise a familiar feeling – that something is wrong, deeply wrong, with your body, but nobody will believe you. The show flirts with body horror to capture the gaslighting that women endure even when wealthy, white and famous. The protagonist is told she has miscarried, yet she insists she still feels something inside her. Her instincts are dismissed as delusion. The subtext is familiar: trust the doctor, not your body. Even now, even here, the pain of women is suspect.

This cultural instinct to minimise female suffering stretches across class, race, and geography, though it lands differently depending on those factors. Nowhere is this disparity more visible — or more deadly — than in the treatment of Black women, who face disproportionately high rates of maternal mortality and medical gaslighting. In the United States, Black women are nearly three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women, regardless of income or education level. A 2020 study found that 32 per cent of Black women report being dismissed or ignored by healthcare providers when expressing concerns about their health — a figure that rises when they are in pain. These are not isolated incidents or tragic anomalies; they are the predictable outcomes of a healthcare system that was never built with Black women’s safety in mind. The result is not just unequal care but preventable death, a quiet epidemic masked by euphemisms like “implicit bias” that obscure the systemic devaluation of Black women’s lives.

The Retrievals does not sensationalise the experiences of women whose pain is ignored. It does not need to. The horror is in the normalisation. The women she interviews are not outliers – they are the unspoken majority, the ones who did not report, the ones who were told it was anxiety, or hormones, or just the price of motherhood. And what the podcast captures, with devastating clarity, is how pain becomes something women learn to expect, to accept, even to internalise as a measure of their worth.

Listening to The Retrievals, I felt the familiar sick churn of recognition at how often women are dismissed, discredited and disbelieved. The question isn’t whether these stories are true – they are – but why it took so long for them to be heard.

This refusal to believe women, to respect their pain as real and urgent, is not confined to the delivery room or the recovery ward – it is part of a broader cultural tide, one that is now surging with renewed force through policy, law, and political rhetoric. The rollback of reproductive rights in the United States and beyond is not just a legislative issue; it is a violent reminder of how little women’s bodily autonomy is trusted, let alone safeguarded. When the state dictates whether a woman can carry a pregnancy, terminate it, or access contraception, it reinforces the same logic that governs the medical gaslighting Burton documents – that women cannot be trusted to know what is happening in their own bodies, that their experiences are suspect, their decisions suspect, their agency provisional. In this landscape, where pain is ignored and autonomy is revoked, The Retrievals becomes a record of testimony, and a cry for change.

Pain should not be the price of being a woman. And yet, for so many, it still is. Not because the body demands it, but because the world refuses to listen.

Photography via The Retrievals, Season 2.