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An essential resource for women navigating their own reproductive healthcare and making decisions as active participants with fully informed consent
Women are staging a reproductive rebellion. For decades, public health has organised reproduction around a simple premise: women should prevent pregnancy with effective contraception unless deemed “fit” for motherhood - and treat abortion as exceptional failure. That settlement is now unravelling. Pill use is declining sharply; abortion rates are at record highs. TikTok misinformation, inadequate sex-ed and overstretched contraceptive services are widely blamed.
This book argues that diagnosis is wrong.
As sexual norms and relationships shift and technology transforms reproductive timelines - allowing pregnancy to be detected days before a missed period and ended safely at home - women’s tolerance for the Pill’s side effects, and for being the default managers of sexual risk is diminishing. This book explores why the revolt began - and what a revolution might look like
Dr Rosie McNee is a Public Health Consultant in Scotland and has worked with the Scottish Government on abortion, contraception and young people’s sexual wellbeing. She is the author of widely cited research on changes in women’s contraceptive use at the time of abortion in the UK, and a member of the Faculty of Public Health’s Special Interest Groups on Health of Women and Girls and Sexual and Reproductive Health.
Clare Murphy is an experienced women’s health advocate who has successfully campaigned for changes to law and policy to improve women’s rights in pregnancy and their access to contraception and abortion. Formerly chief executive of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), she is now a Senior Research Fellow on the Wellcome-funded Contragestive Time project, a major programme exploring new methods of fertility control which challenge the divide between contraception and abortion.
Introduction
Chapter 1: Birthing the contraceptive contract
Chapter 2: Risky business
Chapter 3: Regulating wayward women
Chapter 4: A little bit pregnant
Chapter 5: Changing equations: abortion
Chapter 6: Let’s get digital
Chapter 7: Sex: conscious uncoupling
Chapter 8: Motherhood: The ultimate risk
Chapter 9: Decision time
Conclusion: Reproductive life, renegotiated