Birkbeck to Play Key Role in Groundbreaking Fertility Control Research Funded by The Wellcome Trust
Birkbeck has been awarded £3.85 million from the Wellcome Trust to lead a major new research project exploring innovative approaches to fertility control.
Birkbeck is proud to announce that the pioneering research programme Contragestive Time: Pregnant Uncertainties in Fertility Control has received a Wellcome Trust Discovery Award worth 3.85 million pounds.
The five-year project (2025–2030) is led byProfessor Lisa Baraitser and brings together researchers and clinicians from the University of Bristol, University of Sussex, Manchester Metropolitan University, King’s College London, King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, and Sexual Health:24.
The research focuses on a new generation of fertility control methods known as contragestives. These could be used in the crucial but currently neglected window of time after ovulation and before early abortion is possible. At present, women have no options for fertility control during this period. They must wait until a missed period before treatment can be offered, a process that still requires the authorisation of two doctors under the 1967 Abortion Act.
Many people struggle to find contraceptive methods that are both effective and acceptable, with growing numbers turning away from hormonal options. Contragestives may provide new approaches - such as pills taken weekly, monthly, or after a missed period - that sustain a state of non-pregnancy without the need to confirm whether pregnancy has occurred.
The project will investigate why these technologies have so far remained unavailable -examining the legal, medical, social, cultural, and ethical barriers - and explore what would be needed to introduce them safely and fairly.
Professor Baraitser, whose work focuses on how time shapes psychosocial experience, said:
“As a team we have long and deep experience of researching how cultural norms, social inequalities and lived realities shape people’s ability to make choices, including reproductive choices. Through an investigation of what we are calling ‘contragestive time’ we see an opportunity to open a new conversation around fertility control, and potentially a new future.”
By building better understandings of the cultural meanings of the timing of reproduction, generating new medical evidence, challenging legal frameworks and learning from activist histories, Contragestive Time will lay the foundations for the next generation of fertility control.