Bad Blood: Birth controlled

Our antibiotics are failing us. In 2025, the UK Government said antibiotic resistance (AMR) contributes to more than 35,000 deaths each year in the UK. Emergency doctors say they are losing patients on a regular basis when they run out of ways to treat them. Antibiotics have save ...  Show more

Have you ever been told you aren't good enough to do something, then gone ahead and proved the naysayers wrong by doing it anyway - in glorious, headline-grabbing style? That is the satisfying story of Dr Dean Lomax. Dean grew up in Doncaster with a passion for fossils but after ...  Show more

When Margaret Sanger opened her birth control clinic in 1916, she knew she was breaking the law. Distributing contraceptives, or even literature about birth control, was a jailable offense. But she didn’t care. As a nurse, Sanger had sworn to devote herself to the welfare of thos ...  Show more

Activist Margaret Sanger is responsible for one of the most significant medical and social changes of the 20th Century – giving women the means to control the size of their families. The former nurse, who’d witnessed the aftermath of backstreet abortions and her own mother’s prem ...  Show more

Birth Control is in medicine cabinets all over the world, used by millions of women. But few know its scandalous history involves mass sterilizations of Puerto Rican women, an American business tycoon, and an activist who dabbled in eugenics. What’s eugenics? You’ll find out. And ...  Show more

Forcible sterilizations of black women in the South were so frequent in the 1960s, civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer nicknamed them Mississippi appendectomies. Cristen and Caroline chart the disturbing American practice of nonconsensually sterilizing women of color and th ...