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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
“This is a brave and long-overdue book. Rosie McNee and Clare Murphy challenge the lazy assumption that women who decide against hormonal contraception have simply fallen for misinformation. They listen to what women are saying and take their experiences seriously, making a powerful case for putting women’s lives and choices at the heart of birth control.”
Dr Deborah Cohen, investigative health journalist and author of Bad Influence
“This book needs to be on any reading list about women, health and society. It is THE book to read and discuss on birth control today.”
Professor Ellie Lee, University of Kent
“A timely, provocative, and deeply humane rethinking of reproductive care. With intelligence, compassion, and a powerful respect for women’s lived experiences, it challenges the narrow way we have come to understand ‘birth control’ and opens up a much bigger conversation about trust, autonomy, medicine, and shared responsibility.
Thought-provoking and quietly radical, this book offers a compelling vision of what reproductive care could become when women’s choices, experiences, and lives are taken seriously. It is essential reading for anyone interested in feminism, healthcare, and the future of reproductive autonomy.”
Aimee Walsh, journalist
“A fascinating read examining the complexities of reproductive choice and challenging tired assumptions around how women manage their fertility.”
Dame Cathy Warwick, former chair of BPAS
“This book exposes the moralising baked into contraception and abortion care. I finished it angry, informed and slightly radicalised.”
Dr Erin Williams, University of Edinburgh
“It turns out birth control wasn’t the problem, the moralising about it was. This book finally says it out loud.”
Dr Erin Williams, University of Edinburgh
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