Host Cyd Oppenheimer talks with author Caeli Wolfson Widger about "morning" sickness and parenting, leaning in and pushing through, and what it means to write a feminist novel.
How might the lives of women change if pregnancy were nine weeks instead of nine months? Tessa Callahan, a kind of uber-Sheryl Sandberg, aims to find out. Her company, Seahorse Solutions, is pioneering the inaugural trial of this new technology, based off of a seemingly spontaneous medical aberration two decades ago, where dozens of women experienced this kind of accelerated gestation for no apparent reason. What Tessa does not know is that there are dark secrets lurking in the origins of her technological innovation: secrets held by her business partner, Luke; secrets held by the current Big Brother-like American regime. Set in a not-very-distant future that looks, perhaps, all too much like the world we live in now, this is a novel about gender roles and the meaning of motherhood, the threat and promise of technology, and what we are and are not willing to sacrifice in the name of progress.