Designing Motherhood: Things That Make or Break Our Births

$44.95 at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

More than eighty designs—iconic, archaic, quotidian, and taboo—that have defined the arc of human reproduction.While birth often brings great joy, making babies is a knotty enterprise. The designed objects that surround us when it comes to menstruation, birth control, conception, pregnancy, childbirth, and early motherhood vary as oddly, messily, and dramatically as the stereotypes suggest. This smart, image-rich, fashion-forward, and design-driven book explores more than eighty designs—iconic, conceptual…