Reproduction in the Age of Epigenetics, a Conversation with Rene Almeling, Sarah Richardson, and Natali Valdez
Rene Almeling, Sarah Richardson, and Natali Valdez
The following conversation took place over SquadCast in February 2022. An edited transcript is below.
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[social_warfare]
Sarah Richardson (SR): Welcome to Ask A Feminist. I'm Sarah Richardson and today we are talking about reproduction in the age of epigenetics with Rene Almeling and Natali Valdez. Rene and Natali, could I ask you to introduce yourselves?
Rene Almeling (RA): I am Rene Almeling and I'm an associate professor at Yale University in the Department of Sociology with courtesy appointments in American Studies, the School of Public Health, and the School of Medicine's History of Medicines section. It's really great to be here with you both.
Natali Valdez (NV): Hi, I am Natali Valdez. I'm an assistant professor in Women's and Gender Studies at Wellesley College and my training is in anthropology, specifically medical anthropology and science and technology studies (STS).
SR: And I'm Sarah Richardson, I'm a historian and philosopher of science and gender studies scholar at Harvard and my research is broadly on the history of the sciences of sex, gender, sexuality, and reproduction. Rene, perhaps you could start us off by talking about some of the connections between our work and what led to this conversation.
RA: It's really a delightful opportunity to be here. We're here virtually, on a screen together but we have been in conversation over the years, often in person, sometimes on the phone, sometimes on the page with one another talking about these emergent issues in the science of reproductive health and reproductive risk, and more specifically biomedical approaches to epigenetics from our various vantage points. I'm sitting in sociology; Natali, you're sitting primarily in anthropology; and Sarah, you're a historian of science. We all have toes in gender studies, or sometimes entire feet. But we sit in these multiple communities and have been trained and are in conversation with scholars in these multiple communities. The questions we have asked in our own research are really about these feminist approaches to science and technology and medicine and knowledge and risk, and they feel just as urgent as ever in the face of continuing efforts to define reproductive health solely in terms of biological processes, especially with all the focus on individual bodies and women's bodies, or bodies that have historically been defined as female.
[click_to_tweet tweet="Rene Almeling: 'We're at this moment when basic rights to health during the pandemic, basic rights to abortion, are under threat in the US in a way not seen in decades.'" quote="We're at this moment when basic rights to health during the pandemic, basic rights to abortion, are under threat in the US in a way not seen in decades." theme="style2"]
I think that's what brings us here today, and we thought it was a good moment to sort of pause and reflect on some of the emerging issues for feminist scholars and activists interested in the science of reproduction. So, of course, we're at this moment when basic rights to health during the pandemic, basic rights to abortion, are under threat in the US in a way not seen in decades. And at the same time, we are all watching the biological sciences push for more and more high-tech approaches to some of the most complicated questions about cause and effect in reproductive health.
Here's where I'll toss it back to you, Sarah, first, and then bring Natali into the conversation. Sarah, do you want to start us off with a little bit of history? Your books are on the science of sex and maternal effects and epigenetics; you've published commentaries in science journals about the regularity with which we blame mothers for reproductive outcomes; you direct the GenderSci Lab at Harvard, where you have this amazing interdisciplinary team of researchers doing really innovative work. If you had to step back and do the introductory primer for somebody new to this scene, how did we get here? How do you place some of the current feminist discussions about epigenetics within this longer history of scholarship on reproductive health and reproductive risk?
SR: Thanks, Rene. I think feminist STS scholarship developed along several lines. Of course, there was the interest in women in science, and there was the interest in the sciences of sex, gender, and sexuality themselves. I think reproduction and, as we might call, it “reproductive essentialism” are at the core of the link between biomedical discourse and gender and sex and sexuality and really at the core of many systems of gendered oppression. This is how work like Emily Martin's became so formative to our field and all of these different strands of research, because Martin was mapping how gendered symbolics and ideologies enter into scientific knowledge about reproduction. From that place forward we’ve been grappling with this space of tension between a critique of the reproductive sciences, especially around risk and reproductive essentialism, and also envisioning other ways to approach the reproductive body. One thing that's drawn me to this field of epigenetics is exactly this tension: our interest in what we might call the biosocial body--the plastic body, the environmentally embedded body--which is so rooted in these feminist science studies traditions and at the same time our keen attention to how these sciences can reproduce relations of oppression and embed ideologies of worthy and unworthy bodies, which are familiar to us from the history of eugenic discourse, for example. On that note, I'm interested in hearing from Natali as an anthropologist about the on-the-ground experience, the empirical observations of epigenetics within the context of the clinic and pregnancy cohort research.
NV: Thank you so much, Sarah, for that "how did we get here" context and background. And thank you Rene for spearheading this conversation and getting us all together; I feel so honored to be part of the conversation. I think it is fascinating to be able to describe this elephant, as it were, of epigenetics from multiple angles and bring the fruits of all our labors from different spaces together to project this very complex image of what epigenetics might mean in different areas of reproductive science. From my angle as an anthropologist, I did ethnographic research on ongoing clinical trials in the US and UK that targeted overweight, ethnically diverse, pregnant populations in an effort to reduce the risk of obesity and diabetes in their children and their children's children, because the figure of the pregnant body is imagined to hold multiple generations in one. So drawing on logics of epigenetics and “DOHAD” or the “developmental origins of health and disease,” we have interventions that claim to have a potential impact if you change what pregnant people eat and you control their weight so that potentially you could have some long-term impact on the future health outcomes of the next generations.
In practice, a lot of what this has looked like on the ground has been very similar to older sciences of intervention and evidence-based medicines, because even though we have an idea that epigenetics is new to some people and old to other people that have been working in evolutionary biology for a long time--this isn't a new mechanism of evolution. It is particularly attractive to an interdisciplinary group of people who are interested in how environments can get under our skin.
But the methods and interventions, I found, are actually very old and familiar. So here we have this phenomenon in contemporary pregnancy trials that are drawing from new science and translating it through old methods and older frameworks of intervention. And so part of my book Weighing the Future is basically illustrating the ways in which new science is foreclosed in particular sociopolitical environments as a result of the older framings of individualized interventions and methods like “RCTs” or “randomized control trial,” which is considered the gold standard of evidence-based medicine. So, with this kind of intervention and these methods, we see that new science is not having the impact it had been hoped to have. Rene and Sarah have used the language of "the hope and the hype of epigenetics has not been realized.” I make the case that part of that is because we're using methods and framings of intervention that come from a much older period of time. In one of my chapters, I show that pregnancy studies have a very long history and only recently are they being umbrellaed into the science of reproductive risk, epigenetics, and postgenomics. So, when we have that kind of dynamic--older methods being enveloped into new science or new science being enveloped into older methods--we get a good case study for thinking about the limits of different kinds of innovation.
[click_to_tweet tweet="Natali Valdez: 'When we have that kind of dynamic--older methods being enveloped into new science or new science being enveloped into older methods--we get a good case study for thinking about the limits of different kinds of innovation.'" quote="when we have that kind of dynamic--older methods being enveloped into new science or new science being enveloped into older methods--we get a good case study for thinking about the limits of different kinds of innovation. " theme="style2"]
Unfortunately, the modifications that were imagined to occur in human populations are really hard to capture. That's to say that most of the clinical trials or pregnancy trials that test lifestyle interventions on overweight, ethnically diverse populations are inconclusive. They're not finding clinically significant results between control and experimental groups, and that means we're not quite sure if these interventions could have an impact on health across the life course. We don't know this. The evidence is not conclusive. It's providing us a good opportunity to reevaluate the kinds of methods that we use, the kinds of data that we value collecting, and pouring our resources into certain kinds of data, biobehavioral data at massive scales. What do we want to do with that data and to what end? Those are the kinds of questions that I can illustrate in the book through ethnographic participant-observation data collection.
It was an interesting position that I was in, to be an ethnographer and also be a staff member on these clinical trials, to get a really intimate view into what it looks like to produce a trial and what it looks like to produce a trial in a very particular sociopolitical climate, and what that does to the big, theoretical ideas of epigenetics that kind of have to get grounded in a very particularly constrained context at times. I think that we all have a common theme across our work, which is to sound the alarm that individualized interventions are not necessarily the most effective or valuable investment of our public funds, and we have different examples of why that is a philosophical or moral challenge around blaming mothers. And we have a scientifically based conundrum that these interventions aren't working. And then we have a much more interesting scope that Rene's work brings in to say, "Well, we're actually not even including all the individual bodies, let alone the focus of individualism as a priority.” Rene, would you like to share the expertise you've shown us about the missing parts of the science of reproduction?
RA: Thank you so much for that. There are so many wonderful questions that have already emerged in the beginning of our conversation that I can see this going on for hours! Natali, thank you so much for the really generative questions that you just pointed to that are emerging from your work. I wanted to pull out two different threads. One of them is the original hopes that I think a lot of feminists felt for epigenetics and even more broadly, social scientists and humanists, who have been interested in medical knowledge and bodily risk of all sorts, that there is a sort of expectation or belief--"hope” is really the best way to put it--that epigenetics was going to give us a way to think about not just individual bodies. This is just a truism in medical sociology: one of the things that we know about biomedicine is that it really concentrates our attention at the level of individual bodies: What are they eating? What are they doing? What are they smoking? What are they drinking? We calculate all kinds of population-level information, but the basis is counting up individual bodies. With that understanding of how medicine has individualized health and put it on individual people’s own choices and agency and all the limitations that come with that, I think that a lot of people--and I would include myself in this--had hopes that epigenetics was going to give us a way of thinking about the environment, writ as large as you can write it. The social, political, cultural, historical, geographical, and environmental context that we all exist in, that we are not individuals in, that we are all subject to these broader structural forces. The things that we have decades and decades of data on about the investments that any society makes in health and medicine, clothing, food, environmental cleanliness--all of these things affect all the bodies in that society. The idea that epigenetics might allow us to change our focus and shift it from the level of individuals to these broader environmental and structural forces was a very exciting promise of an epigenetic approach that, for all the reasons that both of you, Natali and Sarah, in your work have shown, has not happened. We took this potentially new framework of thinking about health and risk and have just really reappropriated it back to individual bodies, back to individual people who are pregnant and “what are they eating and drinking?” and “what choices are they making?” We are right back to where we started. I think that is a question: Is there still hope for this or do we just need to acknowledge this is not going to be a way that we can make different arguments?
[click_to_tweet tweet="Rene Almeling: 'A lot of people--and I would include myself in this--had hopes that epigenetics was going to give us a way of thinking about the environment, writ as large as you can write it.'" quote="A lot of people--and I would include myself in this--had hopes that epigenetics was going to give us a way of thinking about the environment, writ as large as you can write it." theme="style2"]
I think that is one of the questions that I would put on the table, in addition to Natali's wonderful question of “what are we collecting this data for and what we want to do with it?” I would put this question on the table: why is it that we're still having to make arguments about how structural and environmental forces matter, after decades of making that argument? Every time I talk to a journalist, I'm constantly having to say “It's not just about individual choices.” I feel like we shouldn't still be here, but we are. So that is one thread, and the other thread that I would pull at, Natali, would be your kind invitation to talk about some of the research that I have been recently doing about what I call "the missing science" of men's reproductive health; really thinking about all the biomedical research that is done on pregnancy and pregnancy health and pregnancy risk. Historically, drawing here on both of your work, it's really been about women and bodies identified as women's bodies. Their health and behaviors and age; all the things that happen and that women do and the effects that that might have on reproductive outcomes. And for all of that focus on women, to not really even ask the question about men's bodies or bodies that produce sperm. What would it mean to actually think about how men's health and men's age and men's behaviors--how those might affect sperm and potentially affect children's health? So I come at it from a different perspective and look at the idea of the gender binary and the relationality between these categories of male and female as underpinning the production of knowledge about reproductive health and risk in such a way that women's bodies were coded as reproductive and men's bodies were coded as not reproductive, and so the bulk of the science and the medical research and the clinical attention has really landed on women's bodies.
[click_to_tweet tweet="Rene Almeling: 'What would it mean to actually think about how men's health and men's age and men's behaviors--how those might affect sperm and potentially affect children's health?'" quote="What would it mean to actually think about how men's health and men's age and men's behaviors--how those might affect sperm and potentially affect children's health?" theme="style2"]
So, what does that mean about what we know and what we don't know about bodies that produce sperm and how they matter for reproductive outcomes? Which then has led me into a whole new can of worms, one of which is these questions about epigenetics and what it means to say, "We don't just want to take all of the stress and anxiety and individualization and moralization and stigmatization that we've done to women and spread it around to everybody." That is not a good way forward, but it has raised a set of new questions for me about what's next. What would produce health for all bodies, regardless of whether they are reproducing or not, regardless of how they identify in terms of their own gender, regardless of the different components of an individual person's body or what an individual does? How do we create a society where we focus on and work to ensure that everybody has access to what we know would make them feel better and be healthier without the individualizing, moralizing, stigmatizing? I will pause there. Those are two threads that I would pull out and I'll see who wants to pick up any or all or others.
SR: This might be a good place to jump in and define what epigenetics is. Rene usefully referred to epigenetics as a framework. It's a set of concepts or a way of approaching the body, genome, questions of heredity, questions of development and of the biology-society relation. At the same time, my work has really argued for the importance of looking very closely at what the science can show. The strength of causal relations, going back to what Natali was saying--what has the science actually shown? Really digging in, field by field, to how epigenetics is being incorporated into claims making. It's really hard to say with a broad stroke what epigenetics is and the strength of its claims because they vary so considerably across areas of research.
Epigenetics refers to the study of molecular mechanisms in and around the DNA molecule that are responsive to environmental cues. Changes in those mechanisms can change the way our genes behave. Epigenetics in the sense often understood by biomedical researchers is simply the measurement of certain accessible biomarkers at the level of gene regulation. So most often it measures the level of methylation using a popular platform (the Illumina gene chip) that allows crude measurements of variation in methylation, which is a factor that can assist in suppressing or activating genes. This mode of measurement, this metric, this collapsing of extreme inequality, deprivation, and exposures into a set of biological markers at the level of the genome and into health outcomes produced at the maternal-fetal interface is a massive collapsing of scales and involves a number of assumptions about what that can measure, how stable it is, what a very small difference in that metric means, and how to measure it against the backdrop of the specificity of a particular population or social ecology. So, to really put a point on both Natali's point about the persistence of these studies despite their failure to provide strong evidence that such interventions are efficacious in improving health outcomes for the mother or for offspring and descendants, and on Rene's point about the way these sciences exclude whole rounds of potential early life influences, including the partner or the sperm contributor: It tells us that there is an empirical gap in the scholarship. If you're studying correlations between early maternal effects or early maternal outcomes and excluding fathers, you essentially don't have a null or control in your study.
[click_to_tweet tweet="Sarah Richardson: 'There is an empirical gap in the scholarship. If you're studying correlations between early maternal effects or early maternal outcomes and excluding fathers, you essentially don't have a null or control in your study.'" quote="There is an empirical gap in the scholarship. If you're studying correlations between early maternal effects or early maternal outcomes and excluding fathers, you essentially don't have a null or control in your study." theme="style2"]
This brings us to this concept of cryptic causality and the crypticity of claims making in this field more broadly, meaning that the effect sizes are small, they vary considerably across populations, and there is a very long causal chain between the proposed exposure and the outcome. And many of the factors that may contribute to that outcome are either hard to measure or simply excluded and unmeasured. That is, to engage with this science we need to dig in to the empirics of it--and this is the feminist empiricist in me, deeply valuing the importance of feminist critiques of science that take seriously the methods internal to the science and then bring all the tools of social analysis to picking up the corners around commonsense assumptions and in fact inferential reasoning within the sciences. I think it is important to appreciate that epigenetics is a contested area of science that varies considerably in its claims across different fields. It is subject to tremendous hype across many different stakeholders with totally different values and ideologies, and, as Natali said, there's this phenomenon where the work persists and continues despite the failures of its findings. There is more to it than the empirical claims. There is this set of narratives, this set of hopes, there is hype, there is a promise, there is a future vision--I've called it the “epigenetic imaginary”--that profoundly shapes how we think about this new research in epigenetics. And that imaginary has a set of assumptions about reproductive risk that is gendered and socially situated in all sorts of ways.
[click_to_tweet tweet="Sarah Richardson: '{Epigenetics} is subject to tremendous hype across many different stakeholders.... There's this phenomenon where the work persists and continues despite the failures of its findings. There is more to it than the empirical claims.'" quote="{Epigenetics} is subject to tremendous hype across many different stakeholders.... There's this phenomenon where the work persists and continues despite the failures of its findings. There is more to it than the empirical claims." theme="style2"]
NV: Thank you so much, Sarah, for that "what is epigenetics?" explanation and for raising what it looks like in practice, because my ethnographic work shows that, like you said, it's a contested space. And one of the forms that I've understood to be contested is that not everybody understands the “environment” to mean the same thing. So depending on the scale you're looking at, nutritional epigeneticists and molecular epigeneticists or neuroscientists who use epigenetics, they're all going to look at very different scales of the environment ranging from the junk stuff around the DNA to organ systems to toxic chemical exposure.
So one of the examples I can provide for how this collapsing works in practice is that the concept of the “maternal environment” becomes narrowed down into individual bodies and behaviors, but particularly you can have the intrauterine environment, the fetal environment that gives the fetus its own environment, which then completely ignores and invisiblizes the pregnant person who is part of this environment. Then you have maternal metabolic environments. That was a notion that some of the scientists I was working with were using, and that was a closed system--discrete, closed, and really had to do with internal mechanisms of metabolism in pregnancy. Then you have maternal environments envisioned through health psychology that consider the home an environment and food as environment. So, you start to see that different scientific agendas start to play a very particular role in assessing the environmental variables that come to matter in testing out interventions in clinical trials. It's kind of a moving target. And I remember people were like, "Well then, so what's the environment?" because of course we can have a solid definition of epigenetics, but we don't have a solid definition of “the environment.” When we’re talking about a science that is explicitly engaged with a gene-environment interaction but the environment isn't stably defined at various scales, then we start to see the unstable ground on which many of these definitions are built. And the consequences of this are that we don't really get the most out of our science. Feminist and critical race perspectives are fundamental to being able to get more out of these innovative ideas. Although it’s discouraging and disappointing that we see the same kinds of interventions, the same kinds of individual priorities valued in new, exciting contexts of postgenomics, I came away with a little bit of an ambivalent, ambiguous sense, like, "OK, so where are we now with our approaches to epigenetics and its value?” And again one of the main things I have to say is epigenetics in pregnancy trials cannot be disentangled from DOHAD. So, we can't think about these mechanisms of evolution without thinking about the impacts across the life course, which is why DOHAD and epigenetics are kind of married together in pregnancy studies and interventions.
[click_to_tweet tweet="Natali Valdez: 'We don't really get the most out of our science. Feminist and critical race perspectives are fundamental to being able to get more out of these innovative ideas.'" quote="We don't really get the most out of our science. Feminist and critical race perspectives are fundamental to being able to get more out of these innovative ideas." theme="style2"]
Thinking about the interactions between fields now is interesting: I get the question "Is there no more hope? Are you just giving us doom and gloom conclusions around this exciting idea?” And I try to maintain some space for ambiguity around its unfolding--that it can be otherwise. And this is inspired by my grounding of my theoretical framework in Black feminism and particularly the work of Katherine McKittrick and Saidiya Hartman and thinking about how failure generates a possibility at the margins. How can science and our understandings of science and knowledge be otherwise? I was inspired by McKittrick's new book Dear Science to think about, what are the spaces where we'll get the most out of this science? And I've been thinking that it might be in the arts, in music and art and in poetry. Thinking about how epigenetics is being taken up in these totally different spaces. Here I'm thinking with these very mainstream, common examples, but in the show Dear White People, there was this invocation of epigenetics as a way to explain intergenerational trauma. In Indigenous, queer poet Tommy Pico’s work, there was this invocation of trauma being explained through experience in the present. This brings up some of the more recent examinations of what it could look like to think about our bodies as holding, beyond environments but in a more temporal scope--the temporality of trauma being invoked. Again, artists probably have the most uplifting and potential around their invocations of epigenetics because the new NIH studies that are drawing on epigenetics, particularly in the realm of race and racism, are basically just saying race is an environmental factor that would influence your outcomes differently: again, as Nadia Abu El-Haj has been saying, a reinscription of genetic racism in a postgenomic age. Basically, we're still comparing outcomes across unstable categories of race as opposed to envisioning racism as an environmental exposure, not race as a category to compare across. So, I'm definitely looking towards the poets and the performers and the artists that can bring new life to this science in a way that the enduring, constricting frameworks of data and methods might not be the space of exploration for drawing out what we can get out of epigenetics moving forward.
RA: I think that is so important and really fascinating to think about. What would be the next steps, or what are the potential directions? Where do we go from here? I was really thinking about how a lot of our attention has been on science, and Sarah, I totally agree with you that we really have to dig in and figure out what data they are using to make what kind of claims based on what kinds of assumptions and with what consequences.
Our attention has been on the scientific realm and the medical realm--and I'm hoping there might be some graduate student out there listening to this thinking about dissertation projects--one of the areas that we need to know more about is the way that all of this is being commodified and turned into products and used as the basis for new companies, so sort of the injunction to “follow the money.” Each of us in our different ways followed the scientific knowledge making and the consequences of that, but there are all kinds of for-profit ventures, and even not-for-profit ventures, that take up epigenetic claims and epigenetic ideas in the service of creating new products. I'm thinking of sperm banks out there that say "bank your sperm while you're young before you get any more epigenetic modifications," or diet shakes, or name all the things. I'm sure there are pills and apps. And think about that there is a market that has emerged around some of these claims and the effects of that market on consumers. People taking hard-earned money and spending it on these things with the hopes that they are making some difference in their lives or the lives of their children. I would point to that as an area that needs a whole lot more empirical engagement so that we know what's going on and what the effects of that outgrowth of the science are.
SR: I really want to thank Natali for that question, how can we move beyond critique? What do we have to offer, for example, scientists or others, whether they're in the arts, whether they're pregnant people, to think about the science of epigenetics? Some of the value feminist approaches might offer--and I've seen some initiatives in this direction--is in developing study designs that are driven and built from the needs and interests of pregnant people and their community, in which there's significant governance and oversight by participants. I think, certainly, there is the possibility of doing this work just for the joy of the basic science of understanding the maternal-fetal relation, if we can surround it with the ethical and critical discourse that doesn't lead to the science contributing to a zero-risk-to-the-fetus frame, where everything is conceived of as either harming or helping. So, some interventions around risk discourse immediately emerge from these sciences and this is where the alternative forms of narration that perhaps artists might bring us could be helpful.
But I also want to push back against the idea that it is in a way incumbent upon us as critics to also offer a solution. What would be better than doing work this way? It is an important call and at the same time can be a very unsophisticated way of quashing critique: "Well, do you have a solution? Is there a better way to do the work?" Well, maybe it's deeply problematic all the way down and rooted in eugenic assumptions and impoverished science! Perhaps in our role as critics, we can preserve a space just for healthy, deep analysis of the science and the work that it is doing in the world. I just want to open a conversation around the asymmetrical pressure on the feminist critic to not only perform the analysis but then provide another research platform or a better way of doing the work. That is, the demand for providing recommendations, the demand for being practical, for going beyond critique, can quickly elide the depth of engagement and theoretical mastery and transformative perspectives on science that is required even to get into the science and process this work that is emerging at the rate of tens of thousands of papers per year. I'm just opening up the question of your experiences of putting your work into the world. Audiences often want to know “what are the implications for me?” and “what can I do?” "What's practical about this feminist scholarship?" How do we as scholars navigate those demands within this incredibly complex discourse where there's a clear hierarchy of knowledge with those who are in the sciences with the highest epistemic authority?
[click_to_tweet tweet="Sarah Richardson: 'The demand for providing recommendations, the demand for being practical, for going beyond critique, can quickly elide {feminist critics'} depth of engagement and theoretical mastery...'" quote="The demand for providing recommendations, the demand for being practical, for going beyond critique, can quickly elide {feminist critics'} depth of engagement and theoretical mastery..." theme="style2"]
NV: Thank you, Sarah, for the provocation around what's demanded of us as feminist scholars in science and technology studies, and I think that on a somewhat related note, we have all talked about the pressure to make our recommendations useful and practical, and I had a reaction to that part: that it's so exhausting to constantly have to channel all of our intellectual labors towards making very similar claims that have been made over the course of generations of feminists who work within and around reproductive health and politics, [to argue for] access to healthcare, moving beyond a binary framework of choice, embracing a reproductive-justice framework into our politics and our science form the ground up--not just at the end but literally, "How do we ask research questions that keep in mind BIPOC [Black and Indigenous people of color] and vulnerable populations that are most impacted by the science and its implementation at a public-health scale?” I think more recently the [questions have become,] "What does this mean now? What does your work mean now in this potentially postapocalyptic age of abortion access, if we might not have access to abortion in the coming months and years?” On the one hand, I believe fundamentally that we need to keep sounding the alarm over and over and over again, as all of us have, and, in particular, Black feminists and scholars of color have also been alarmed for a very long time. I'm on board for creating the energy and refocusing the attention onto those same issues of rights and justice. And on the other hand, I also feel that my creativity is often foreclosed because the sociopolitical climate is not changing even though our ideas are so generative and so fertile--well beyond the same questions around binary frameworks of reproduction and access and justice. It’s a kind of internal tension that I have: “What if I lived in a world where I could think about anything and my ideas could just be imaginative and I wouldn't have to be worried about the very same issues that generations of feminists before me had to worry about?” I'm hoping that we can hold that tension in making interventions that are necessary to confront our social crises and also create space for our imagination and creativity beyond it. I'm hopeful that we as a collective group of thinkers can. And I'm just very grateful for this conversation that we've had today.
SR: Wow, Natali those are powerful words to end on. Thank you so much to Natali Valdez and Rene Almeling for this wonderful conversation. I'm looking forward to the work we'll continue to do together.
Sarah S. Richardson is Professor of the History of Science and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. A historian and philosopher of science, Richardson directs the Harvard GenderSci Lab, a collaborative, interdisciplinary research lab dedicated to generating concepts, methods, and theories for biomedical research on sex and gender. Richardson is the author of The Maternal Imprint: The Contested Science of Maternal-Fetal Effects and Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome. She is a member of the Signs editorial board.