Breaking Up with Birth Control

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