This January I was about 90% done with the proposal for my next book, ideally on hormonal contraception. I was super excited about it, but also floundering a bit, in part because I was trying to speak a project into existence before I had done enough reading.

That same month, the Illinois Federation of Teachers came through with the funding to support the union campaign I was co-leading with a number of other committed faculty.

It felt easy – and I in no way regret – putting that work down to put as much effort as I could manage into our card campaign. What this means is that we have a year to get over half of the tenure-stream faculty here at the University of Illinois to sign cards indicating they want us to represent them as a union.

It’s been a really fun five months so far, full of organizing in STEM departments and building up a group of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians who want to fight an authoritarian government and hold our university to the values it claims to hold. People think scientists aren’t political, but they are: the problem is that the very nature of our training teaches us to self-censor, that believing our work is objective is built into our incentive structures, that we are forced to compartmentalize our political perspective away from our scholarship.

In recent years, though, my colleagues have realized they cannot teach about drone technology without teaching the ethics of the militarized drones murdering Gazans; they can’t teach pandemics without bumping up against the fact that our HHS Secretary is anti-vaccine; they cannot write grants about reproductive health unless they are willing to sign their names to statements indicating their agreement with Trump’s gender ideology executive order.

As a result, over the course of my organizing I’ve realized that more and more STEM researchers are realizing that STEM needs critical science and technology studies. I think they are coming to understand that critique is an investment, a belief that the truth is knowable, and comes from a desire to make things better.

Which is why, as I’m finally able to come up for air a little this summer and look back at my own research, and what I’ve learned from dozens of conversations with colleagues, that I’m ready to return to this topic and bring the lens of critique I was avoiding.

Ok, so what does this have to do with hormonal contraception?

Given all the ways in which science is down, it felt weird to work on a book that was fundamentally a critique of science, of the failures of clinical science and the pharmaceutical industry to produce a constellation of contraceptive options that do not produce systemic changes (sex steroid hormone receptors are all over our bodies) in order to address a localized problem (avoiding pregnancy).

The bravery of my STEM colleagues, who themselves are now identifying problematic structures and working together in solidarity, has made me reassess my scholarly holding pattern. If they can question the structures that constrain them, who am I to think science can’t handle a more scholarly discussion of reproductive science, and how that intersects with reproductive justice?

So, I finally started reading the hormonal contraception literature again. With Period, I spent a few years podcasting and interviewing people I admired in the field of menstrual science to inform my thinking. With Pregnancy Interrupted (pre-order now!), I was so upset by the Dobbs decision that I created a daily calendar hold for “abortion hour” to start to educate myself on the science of how pregnancies end. With this next book, I hadn’t been laying the groundwork, so I did the calendar hold thing again – now I have an “HC hour” every day where I can’t schedule meetings over it (…mostly) and need to read or write about hormonal contraception.

In the next newsletter, I’ll tell you a little about what I found in the first bolus of readings. It has to do with the reorganizing effects of hormones on the adolescent brain, and how hormone exposures at this time may impact how we regulate fear into adulthood, with implications for anxiety, depression, and PTSD.