The Woman Who Got Your Best Friend Pregnant

Women read the book because they wanted children, because their older sisters sent them copies, because they had idly paged through it at a cousin’s house and couldn’t put it down. Because it contained information about their bodies that they didn’t get in their all-girls high schools or sex-ed classes or OB/GYN visits. They bought the book because all their friends were using it instead of hormonal birth control — they thought, Sure, it seems better to be “natural” than to keep taking pills. They read it even though they weren’t really into health books and the whole thing seemed “a little woo-woo,” but the friend who swore by it had two Ivy League degrees and worked in finance, so why not give it a go? They brought it to their doctors and midwives. They used it to conceive their daughters and then passed it on to them when they started to consider having families. They clung to it like a best friend, carrying it around the city, dog-earing the pages.

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