Egg-freezing boomed during the pandemic. Precipitated by the pause on dating life that many women in their late twenties counted on to find a husband, and facilitated by an aggressive new marketing push on social media, women took their gnawing fear to Big Pharma, who promised an alchemical peace with little to no side effects. Of course, this wasn’t the only thing pharmaceutical companies lied about at the time or any time before. But as experimental fertility procedures become a more “normal” option for women, the mendacious secrecy about its effects on the female body will catch women off guard. Nobody thinks that the procedure marketed to “preserve your fertility” might kill your fertility. But, as my most recent guest on Girlboss, Interrupted explains, it can and, not infrequently, it does.

In a healthy society, would everyone and their mother need a complicated cocktail of uppers and downers just to get through the day? Of course not, and we obviously don’t live in a healthy society. Around 13% of Americans take antidepressants, and their use is growing around the world. The long-term use of the drugs is also increasing, year after year. In 2000, around 5 million Americans had been taking antidepressants for five years or more. By 2018, this had increased to 15.5 million. At the same point, almost 25 million adults had been taking antidepressants for more than two years, a 60 percent increase from 2010.

Crime’s up, grocery prices are totally out of control, and kids are dying almost every day from accidental fentanyl poisonings at local high schools, when they’re not being indoctrinated to hate their parents and their country. How are we supposed to raise families in this blighted, benighted hellscape?