Authors: Kanak Gupta, MSc Student | Editors: Romina Garcia de leon, Janielle Richards (Blog Co-Coordinators) | Expert Reviewers: Harman Grewal, Yas Botelho,
Published: April 11th, 2025
It would not be an alarmist stance to say that we are currently in the midst of a scientific and public health crisis, especially when it comes to the health of women and gender minorities. Under the guise of getting rid of “DEI” minority initiatives, the new United States administration has rapidly dismantled its medical research and healthcare infrastructure. Given that the US leads the world in biomedical research funding and progress, the ripple effects of this disintegration are being felt worldwide.
Unsurprisingly, the people at the receiving end of these orders—women, people of color, queer and trans folks—are suffering the most. Women (who make 51% of the population, i.e., a majority) are losing reproductive rights and research that had only recently begun to care about them. Trans people are losing access to life-saving gender-affirming care amidst a hateful, self-serving witch hunt. And naturally, women and queer folks of color will doubly bear the brunt of these draconian policies. However, even as it seems that we are sliding back to the early 20th century in a matter of a few weeks, it is important to remember that getting to the place we are at in women’s healthcare and research has taken decades of protest and advocacy for equitable healthcare and research policies. We stand on foundations built by revolutionaries who fought their way out of even more dire circumstances, and with no precedence. In dark times like these, we can look to these predecessors for hope and inspiration to continue fighting for our rights.
In 1953, nurse Margaret Sanger (founder of modern day Planned Parenthood) and philanthropist Katharine McCormick recruited Dr. Gregory Goodwin Pincus to invent the first hormonal contraceptive, “Enovid”. The invention of “the pill” granted many women reproductive autonomy and played a huge role in the women’s liberation movement. However, even after research on modern contraception methods took off, contraception was considered immoral as it was counterproductive to the societal “role” of women as breeders. As such, contraceptives were only accessible to married women under the guidance of a doctor and their husbands until the historic Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 that legalized abortion and women’s rights to reproductive privacy in the US. Today, after the repeal of this ruling and the rise of anti-abortion legislation across the country, it is important that we remember that the feminist movement fought its way through these unjust laws and will do so again.
In Canada in 1968, when sharing information about contraception was illegal and abortion was punishable by a life sentence, students at McGill University printed The Birth Control Handbook. The illegal handbook disseminated information about not only birth control methods but also women’s health and political essays on the socioeconomic barriers to access to sexual health resources. By 1974, 3 million copies of this handbook had been secretly circulated around Canada and the United States and reached the underground abortion network in the US. Known as the Janes, the Abortion Counseling Service of Women’s Liberation was a collective that worked to help women receive safe abortions before Roe v. Wade. Since the overturning of the decision in 2022, the network has reemerged stronger as We Are Jane, along with many other women’s health advocacy groups. If a group of students at McGill and a small collective in Chicago could reach millions of women in the 1960s, today, with all the reach of the internet, we have more power than ever to ensure all women have access to sexual health education and resources.
Though much like the old bans on dissemination of women’s health information, people’s access to information is being controlled again. The CDC recently took down all webpages related to women’s health, gender, and sexuality (as described in a recent blog by the WHRC). After a court blocked the executive order, the pages were restored, albeit with a harmful disclaimer stating that “Any information on this page promoting gender ideology is extremely inaccurate and disconnected from the immutable biological reality that there are two sexes, male and female.” While the blocking of the order gives us hope, the disclaimer reminds us that gender minorities are at the greatest risk of erasure at the hands of this metaphorical burning of books.
However, if there is any group of people who have won their rights the hard way, it is the LGBTQ2S+ community. During the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 80’s, when the public health crisis was overlooked as “Gay Related Immune Deficiency” (GRID) decimated queer communities in cities, lesbians took up the mantle of providing healthcare to gay men while other doctors and nurses abandoned them. Political resistance and civil disobedience by the community gave rise to AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) in 1987, an organization that was instrumental in raising awareness and improving the lives of people with AIDS through direct actions, grass roots movements, and research.
During the height of the epidemic, misinformation was rampant and it was popular belief (even espoused by publications like Cosmo) that women were at low-risk of contracting HIV because penis-to-vagina transmission was impossible. The CDC’s definition of AIDS itself did not include symptoms that women with AIDS exhibited (such as pneumonia, Pelvic Inflammatory Disease, and cervical cancer) because they were different from those seen in men. ACT UP’s women caucus held some of the most effective demonstrations and protests in recent history with iconic slogans such as: “Silence = Death”; “Yes, the Cosmo Girl CAN get AIDS!”; and “Women Don’t Get AIDS. They Just Die From It.” In 1991, in large part due to ACT UP’s activism, the CDC expanded the definition of AIDS and the social security and medical coverage that came with it to women.
Though equitable access to healthcare and research are experiencing a major setback, the determination of the past movements that gave us the rights that we have today are proof that not only can we not give up now, but that we owe it to them to persevere. While in research we aim for objectivity and empiricism, science is political, especially medicine, and right now it needs political action.
The post The 1950’s Called, It’s Time for Another Wave of Feminism appeared first on Women's Health Research Cluster.
