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Purpose – In this chapter, I set out to unexcise the messiness of maternalisms and disparities in women's health care by addressing narratives about reproductive trauma. I ask, what might it mean to analyze the interaction between the medical industrial complex and women who experience reproductive trauma as a social practice, one that is constitutive of gender socialization and the medicalization of women's bodies in the American nation-state? I accomplish responding to the question by addressing a vastly underresearched and underaddressed pregnancy complication Hyperemesis Gravidarum (HG).

Methodology/Approach – First, I thread posts from supportive online reproductive trauma forums to weave thematic narratives about and the impacts of HG. Next, I review biomedical literature in order to probe potential etiology. Third, I share my debilitating experiences with HG – reproductive traumas – to interrogate dominant androcentric biomedical discourse of pregnancy culture, maternalisms, maternal ideology, and epistemic violence.

Findings – Our knowledge about HG continues to be murky and unresolved, leaving many pregnant people – namely women – untreated.

Research limitations/implications – I call on the absence of contemporary protective sociocultural structures that provide support and care – gendered health-care disparities – for women during pregnancy, labor and delivery, and postpartum in order to advocate reproductive trauma is a viable and normal expression in the context of misogynist social scripts.

Originality/Value of the Chapter – My hope is to raise the volume on narratives of pregnancy trauma and reproductive experience using HG as a case study and my intention is to argue gender is a salient factor in health-care disparities.