Culture Wars/Current Controversies

The Woman Who Got Your Best Friend Pregnant

By on • ( Leave a comment )
Last year, a friend told me she was reading a book called Taking Charge of Your Fertility. She wasn’t ready to have kids just yet, but she’d been inspired to start logging her body temperature and fluids anyway; according to the book, doing this would allow her to know where she was in her reproductive cycle (days when she was fertile, days when she wasn’t). I forgot about this conversation until I got a pitch from Sara Harrison, who wanted to profile Toni Weschler, the author. Soon, I learned that my friend was part of a vast network of women who had read this 30-year-old manual and had their minds blown by the things they didn’t know about their bodies. One editor’s wife has gifted it to nearly every woman in her life. Another editor messaged me: “She is responsible for my children and all my friends’ kids.” Today, Weschler is 68, child-free, and working on revisions for the book’s last edition. She’s also deeply stressed. The fall of Roe has upped the stakes for the women who use the book as birth control. It doesn’t help that it has also attracted a strange, extremist fan base: a conservative religious audience that wants to see the end of hormonal contraception. “I believe my book was the catalyst for getting this information out there,” Weschler says. “The bad news is if you put this information in the wrong hands, it could be a disaster.”

—Joy Shan, features editor, New York

The Woman Who Got Your Best Friend Pregnant Taking Charge of Your Fertility is the reproductive manual embraced by both the right and the left.

Photo: Robb Mitchell via Toni Weschler
Read the full story
Enjoying One Great Story?
Subscribe now for unlimited access to everything New York.

More From Today
Some youth baseball teams have adopted the fundraising tactics of nonprofits to pay for their entry to luxe pay-to-play tournaments — even when players’ parents are wealthy, reports Michelle Hainer for Intelligencer.
READ MORE »
Despite what Resy might have us believe, the “impossible” restaurant reservation is a ridiculous myth, argues food editor Alan Sytsma, and it remains very easy to get a great meal in this town.
READ MORE »
Vulture’s Roxana Hadadi compiles the many questions she has about The Jinx: Part Two’s “Wonder Twins,” a pair of John Grisham protagonists run through a Workaholics filter.
READ MORE »
What does motherhood look like in Florida? Kathryn Jezer-Morton went south to meet local moms and discovered they often defy the identity scripts the rest of us are used to.
READ MORE »
Jim VandeHei, the outspoken CEO of Axios and co-founder of Politico, talks to Intelligencer’s Benjamin Hart about AI-proofing the news and why almost every article should be shorter. 
READ MORE »
Our greatest writers’ greatest hits, from the New York archives, and for subscribers only. Sign up here.
Get The Newsletter

Categories: Culture Wars/Current Controversies

Leave a Reply