Naomi Kritzer’s new novel Obstetrix puts an obstetrician inside the machinery of post-Roe punishment politics and then locks the door. According to Cory Doctorow, writing at Pluralistic, the book is a taut thriller about Dr. Elizabeth Gwynn, a doctor whose life is wrecked after she performs an abortion to save a patient.
Macmillan lists Obstetrix at its site, and Doctorow places it in the same broad shelf as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Naomi Alderman’s The Power. That is reviewer framing, not a lab result, but the mechanism he describes is specific: law, religion, professional blacklisting, and coercive pregnancy care all grinding through one doctor’s body and career.
The setup is legal terror, then actual kidnapping
Doctorow says the novel opens with Gwynn having been prosecuted by North Dakota’s attorney general after the lifesaving abortion. The charge is felony murder. The attorney general, in Doctorow’s account of the plot, offers her a way to plead out if she publicly says she was wrong, making her a warning to other obstetricians.
By the time the main action begins, Gwynn is in Minneapolis. She has served time, her money is dwindling, and hospitals or clinics are not lining up to hire a doctor with that record. Then a midwifery service calls with an offer for on-call work. It sounds odd, but steady income is steady income.
The job lead becomes a trap. Doctorow describes Gwynn arriving at a residence used by the midwives, being offered tea, and blacking out after it has been drugged. She comes to at intervals in a van during a trip that takes days. Even before she knows where she is being taken, Doctorow says, she is already assessing how to get out.
Her destination is a remote, frozen compound run by a Christian cult focused on fertility. The group needs an obstetrician, especially because the founder’s daughter, identified as the pastor’s daughter, has a high-risk pregnancy.
Kritzer’s familiar target: systems with people inside them
Doctorow argues that the novel’s middle section is where Kritzer does the sharper work. He describes Obstetrix as a study of a “high-demand” cult, showing how members pressure one another into obedience and how control keeps working even when nobody is visibly watching. In other words, the surveillance stack here is social before it is technical. The compliance protocol runs on shame, fear, belief, and dependency. Grim, but efficient.
The book also sits beside Kritzer’s earlier fiction, as Doctorow presents it. He points to Catfishing on CatNet, her breakout novel about an AI trained through a group chat that becomes sentient and wants cat pictures, as a story about online friendship and mutual aid. He also cites her 2015 story “So Much Cooking,” about pandemic lockdown, which gained renewed attention in 2020, and her 2023 YA novel Liberty’s Daughter, set on a libertarian seastead and told through the founder’s daughter.
Doctorow does not disclose the ending of Obstetrix, but says the book resolves its thriller plot while keeping faith with its larger themes: patriarchal power, religious control, and the professional vulnerability of doctors caught between medical duty and political prosecution.
This story draws on original reporting from Pluralistic.
