Last year, a friend told me she was reading a book calledTaking 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 ofRoehas 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.”
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