Unbearable by Irin Carmon
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ABOUT IRIN CARMON
Irin Carmon is a senior correspondent at New York magazine and the author of Unbearable: Five Women and the Perils of Pregnancy in America, to be published by One Signal/Simon & Schuster on October 28, 2025. She speaks frequently across the country on gender, reproduction, and public affairs.
She is the co-author of the New York Times bestselling book Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. "That I responded so personally to it is a testimony to Ms. Carmon's storytelling and panache," the paper's staff book critic wrote of Notorious RBG. The book was an inspiration for an Oscar-nominated documentary, RBG, that featured Carmon and her co-author, and has sold well over a half million copies.
Carmon’s New York magazine reporting and essays have twice been recognized with Front Page Awards from the Newswomen’s Club. Her reporting in The Washington Post on sexual harassment at Charlie Rose and CBS News in 2018 was honored with a Mirror Award from the Newhouse School at Syracuse University and was a finalist for the Livingston Award.
Previously, Carmon worked at CNN as an on-air contributor and MSNBC as a national reporter, and as a staff writer at Salon and Jezebel. She lives in New York City with her husband, the author and professor Ari Richter, and their two daughters.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Unbearable: Five Women and the Perils of Pregnancy in America by Irin Carmon is out in paperback on October 20, 2026.
From the coauthor of the New York Times bestseller Notorious RBG and award-winning journalist Irin Carmon, an ambitious and “gripping page-turner” (The Boston Globe) of what’s gone wrong with pregnancy in America, through the lens of history, politics, and the searing experiences of five women.
Award-winning journalist Irin Carmon follows five women in New York City and rural Alabama through an American system that can turn the most ordinary human event—pregnancy—into a fight for your life, your freedom, and your dignity. What happens as these women seek respectful, high-quality medical care for their pregnancies, whether wanted or not, is a uniquely American story, one that also includes a heroic doctor fighting for the better reality that everyone deserves.
Eight months pregnant herself when the Supreme Court allowed states to ban abortion, Carmon spent years reporting what she felt in her bones: that the typical story of pregnancy had been radically incomplete—and that the story is bigger than one court case or one experience of pregnancy. Going beyond the headlines and any one experience or choice, Unbearable illuminates the buried history of American obstetrics, the disappearance of pregnancy care options across the country, and the ever-proliferating laws that treat a fetus as a person and a woman as a vessel.
A profound call to action, “Unbearable exposes the devastating reality: that in today’s America becoming pregnant can mean losing your basic human dignity and autonomy. With meticulous reporting, riveting storytelling, and profound compassion, Carmon reveals how our healthcare system fails women at their most vulnerable moments, and why we must do better” (Hillary Rodham Clinton).