Half a dozen periods
It’s the first full week I’ve had childcare since mid-December, and the semester here at Illinois starts next week. Of course I’m blowing up and piecing back together my syllabus for my undergraduate class – trying this year to address a few of the weaknesses or gaps that every year I tell myself I’m going to fix and then don’t. It’s kind of a feminist science and technology class, but smooshed into a general education requirement. I’ll be talking about the incentive structures of science and how they lead to structural, interpersonal, and ethical inequities, but also looking at specific case studies of times that science has gone awry. From how long it took us to acknowledge the harms of tobacco, to the consequences of military funding of oceanography, to the unconsidered coercive elements of long-acting contraception (even as it is also crucial healthcare)… we’ll be getting heavy. Maybe you’ll let me know if you have ideas for topics or readings for this class as I panic-revise over the next few days!
I’ve also spent huge chunks of this week participating in workshops for a consensus committee that will be looking at contraceptive-induced menstrual changes, and am enjoying asking lots of questions, as well as learning a lot more behind-the-scenes stuff about how clinical trials work from some excellent colleagues.
A few cool links
1. A fantastic article out last month relevant to the trouble I’ve been making this week: Emily Mann of the University of South Carolina conducted interviews with providers of long-acting reversible contraception and found that they “center their own contraceptive preferences and behaviors, prioritize pregnancy prevention via LARC use above other priorities patients may have, and communicate that contraceptive use is compulsory for women of reproductive age.” Continuing to steal straight from the abstract, the author continues that “[b]y mobilizing their medical authority under the guise of achieving seemingly value-neutral public health goals, clinicians obscure the role that normative assumptions about reproductive behavior play in their practices of contraceptive counseling.” There are several great papers over the last five to ten years getting at issues of reproductive coercion, and the frequent mismatch between provider and patient priorities. Qualitative work that looks at the providers themselves is especially useful at making this mismatch plain.
2. NAGPRA, or the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, was a federal law passed in 1990 intended to at least begin to repair the harms of anthropological extraction, looting, and stealing from Native American peoples over the last several centuries. Except since then it’s been met with a lot of resistance from universities, museums, and anthropologists themselves. Indigenous scholars, tribal nations, and many others have been drawing attention to the distance between the spirit of the law and the letter of the law here – in particular with how easy it is for institutions to say “well we don’t know who this stuff belongs to so it’s unidentified” as a way to exempt themselves from having to return anything. Very glad to see ProPublica doing some major reporting on this, especially after the big Harvard story last year.
3. Hard to stop talking about COVID when four to five hundred people are still dying from it every day in the United States, and it’s the third leading cause of death for adults! Yet a lot of people are invested in our not talking about it, not talking about how the vaccines reduce only severity and barely make a dent in reducing transmission, not talking about the importance of persisting with actual transmission mitigation to stop ever more variants from mucking everything up. Gregg Gonsalves wrote a great piece on the weird centrism that has taken over our politics and is trying to force a “normal” that is killing people. You know, like the “normal” we have with gun control. Accept massive numbers of preventable death and disability or you’re going to ruin the vibes, man.
Weird period fact
You may know we have done work in our lab to establish that it is not uncommon for menstrual changes to happen after COVID-19 vaccination (and that our work inspired a flurry of other projects that ultimately had the same findings). But did you also know that menstrual changes occur after contracting covid-19 itself – and increasingly likely that these changes are more persistent and may also be associated with changes to fertility? Where post-vaccine the most likely change was a heavier or longer period, post-COVID the more common disruption is for periods to get more irregular or lighter.
Source: Khan et al (2022) SARS-CoV-2 infection and subsequent changes in the menstrual cycle among participants in the Arizona CoVHORT study, American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 226(2):270-273. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajog.2021.09.016