Now Available · Teneritas, 2026
Why Congenital Heart Disease Deserves to Be Seen
| Author | Adrian Adair |
| Publisher | Teneritas · Heartbeat Forward |
| Format | Paperback · Digital |
| Subject | Congenital Heart Disease · Advocacy |
About the Book
Congenital heart disease is the most common birth defect in the world. It is also one of the least talked about.
The Quiet Majority
1 in every 100 babies born in the United States arrives with a congenital heart defect, making CHD the most common birth defect in the world. More children die from congenital heart disease each year than from all childhood cancers combined. That number is staggering. The silence around it is more staggering still. The Quiet Majority is the book that steps into that silence and refuses to leave.
Written by CHD advocate and Heartbeat Forward founder Adrian Adair, this is not a medical textbook and it is not a memoir. It is something rarer: a clear-eyed, deeply human case for why congenital heart disease deserves the same cultural urgency we give to cancer, to autism, to causes with louder voices and bigger budgets.
Each chapter moves between science and story, between statistics and the living faces behind them. By the final page, the reader understands not only what CHD is, but why the world's response to it has fallen so far short of the need.
Inside the Book
A clear-eyed accounting of how many lives CHD touches, and why those numbers remain invisible in the public conversation.
The human stories that statistics erase. The cost carried by families in waiting rooms around the world.
Why heart disease research funding and public awareness remains so disproportionate to its scale and burden.
How the language we use around CHD shapes how survivors understand themselves and how the world sees them.
An honest look at the parents, siblings, and caregivers who carry CHD's weight long after a child leaves the hospital.
What it would take for CHD to receive the recognition, funding, and cultural acknowledgment it has always deserved.
The Work Continues
The Quiet Majority is the beginning. Adrian Adair is building a body of work dedicated to the CHD community, from letters written to waiting room families to books written directly to the children who carry these scars. Every title published under Teneritas exists for the same reason: because these stories deserve to be told.
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