Kristyn Hodgdon
Everything you’re feeling, but didn’t know how to say.
Lowering Your Ovarian Cancer Risk Shouldn't Need a Subscription
This week, the New York Times ran a piece that could genuinely lower women's odds of getting ovarian cancer, then put it behind a paywall. I clicked, hit the wall, and did what anyone does in 2026: opened Instagram, where an OB/GYN had already posted the whole answer for free.
The headline is almost unbelievable. The most common, deadliest form of ovarian cancer, responsible for 70% of cases and 90% of deaths, actually starts in the fallopian tubes, not the ovaries. There's no mammogram-style screening for it, but removing the tubes in a quick procedure called a bilateral salpingectomy cuts that risk by nearly 80%, according to the study behind the article.
I'm done having kids. Three was always the plan, although "done" is still a word I'm growing into, since we're still paying to store our embryos. Watching the OB/GYN explain who actually qualifies — mostly women finished building their families, or who know they never want kids at all — I realized it's apparently a five-minute add-on if you're already having any other abdominal surgery, and a real option to bring up even if you're not.
What I still can't get over is that it took an Instagram reel to route around the New York Times, just to learn how to lower my own cancer risk. Information like this shouldn't require a subscription, or even a login — which is part of why Rescripted has never charged for ours. Women don't need one more thing standing between them and their own health.
The real breakthrough this week wasn't the surgery. It was a doctor deciding that information this good doesn't get to hide behind a paywall.
The Real Reason We're All Googling 'Restorative Reproductive Medicine'
I spent part of this week at a fertility conference, sitting in a talk on "restorative reproductive medicine," a term I'd seen floating around fertility TikTok but never actually had explained to me.
Restorative reproductive medicine, it turns out, means trying to find and fix what's actually causing infertility (endometriosis, thyroid stuff, ovulation issues) before anyone mentions IVF. It sounds reasonable in a vacuum, except this isn't happening in one. I did many rounds of IVF over six years to get my kids, and I couldn't unhear that.
My PCOS wasn't diagnosed until my twenties, years after a doctor put me on the pill "to regulate my cycle" and called it a day. I often think about how differently things might have gone if someone had investigated why my cycles were forty-six days long instead of just managing it. Which is why RRM's pitch is appealing, AND why it's worth being skeptical of.
RRM isn't one governing body, and it's not neutral. Its most established version, NaProTechnology, grows out of Catholic medical ethics and excludes IVF, IUI, donor gametes, and surrogacy, shutting out LGBTQ couples and single parents. It's also a talking point for anti-abortion groups pushing state laws, like Arkansas's, that let providers refuse IVF on religious grounds. ASRM calls this ideology dressed up as medicine. One presenter cited unpublished data claiming nearly 40%(!) of RRM providers aren't medically licensed — reason enough to ask exactly what your own provider's license and training actually cover.
In my (very non-medical) opinion, the real issue isn't RRM versus IVF. It's why some patients go looking for alternatives at all — either because IVF is expensive, or it didn't work, and no one explained why.
Two things can be true at once: some of us will always need IVF, and all of us deserve real answers before we get there.
Lindsay Clancy and the Thoughts We Don't Say Out Loud
I don't think I'm alone in not being able to look away from the Lindsay Clancy case — the Duxbury, Massachusetts mom currently on trial for killing her three children. The defense argues she was in the grip of severe postpartum psychosis after being prescribed over a dozen(!) psychiatric medications in four months. The prosecution calls the murders "premeditated." It's truly heart-shattering, to put it mildly.
I'm usually an open book about my path to parenthood, but this is one part I don't talk about enough. When I was about eight weeks postpartum with my twins, after a long fertility journey to get there, I developed postpartum anxiety and OCD. I had intrusive thoughts about driving with my kids in the car, convinced I might suddenly swerve into oncoming traffic, and at one point, I was terrified of being alone with them.
At the time, I couldn't tell if these were feelings I wanted to act on (because why else would my brain be handing them to me), or if they were just thoughts my mind refused to let go of. My therapist helped me draw the line between a thought and an impulse, and my kids' pediatrician encouraged me to go on medication. Lindsay Clancy, despite quite literally begging for help, wasn't so lucky — and the system failed her for it.
Almost nobody outside perinatal psychiatry seems to know that somewhere between 70-100% of new moms report unwanted, intrusive thoughts about their baby being harmed. Most of us never say it out loud, and most of us are never in danger of acting on it. But anyone who's stood in those terrifying shoes, psychosis or not, knows she likely had zero intention of hurting those kids.
Guilty or not, she's already living through the sentence the rest of us got spared: needing help and not getting it soon enough.
The Ultimatum Has Too Much Therapy Speak (and Not Enough Therapy)
I had a 15-hour travel day on Monday, so naturally, I binge-watched the last few episodes of the most recent season of The Ultimatum, and DAMN.
For anyone who hasn't fallen down this particular rabbit hole: it's the show where couples who can't agree on marriage split up, date other people in the cast for three weeks, then decide whether to get engaged to their original partner (or someone new entirely). High stakes, messy execution, and apparently, a whole lot of therapy speak with maybe not a lot of actual therapy happening.
Take Ashley, Killian, Blake, and Hayley's hours-long changeover conversation, for example: boundaries, accountability, manipulation, all of it spoken fluently and none of it actually saying anything productive.
I mean, I get it; I do. "I need to protect my peace" is a much better sentence than "I'm scared and I don't want to talk about this," even though the second one is much closer to the truth. But when Hayley told Blake she was feeling "unheard" because he wasn't performing all five love languages while simultaneously cursing him out, it felt less emotionally intelligent and more unhinged.
I should note: I didn't have any of this language in my early 20s. I didn't know what a trauma response was; I definitely didn't know what boundaries were, and I learned a bunch of life lessons the hard way — so I do give them props for having the right words. But I've also started to wonder if "protecting your peace" can be its own kind of avoidance, albeit a more sophisticated one.
If you're reciting the terms instead of doing the work they're supposed to describe, does that even count as personal growth?
It's probably not a coincidence that the couples who came out okay in the end weren't the ones speaking the most fluent therapy-speak. They just respected each other.
Mom Guilt Has a Peak Season, and It's Summer
I used to love summer. Warm sunshine on my face, a good book in my hand, the salt air wind in my face.
Then I had kids.
I should start by saying we live in a beach town, and summer is still superior to pretty much every other season, with the exception of the lead-up to Christmas (for obvious reasons I won't get into here). But working mom guilt in the summer is the pits.
My kids are either watching TV or in camp — half-day, because we don't have the kind of money it takes to send three kids to all-day, all-summer camp. So most days end around 1:30 p.m., and the rest of it is just me, pulled in eighteen directions, doing none of it at 100 percent.
And then Instagram helpfully reminds me that I only get 18 summers with my kids, so I should be crafting them a screen-free, sprinkler-in-the-backyard, "90s analog summer" instead of handing them an iPad so I can finish a work email. Cool. Thanks. Very relaxing content, very normal amount of pressure to put on a random Tuesday afternoon in July.
A 2026 Afterschool Alliance survey found that more than half of families who want their kid in a structured summer program can't get one, and cost is the reason. Meanwhile, the algorithm is busy convincing us that the real failure isn't the childcare gap; it's that we didn't turn off the TV and make homemade popsicles.
My kids won't remember the camp we couldn't afford. They'll (hopefully) just remember that I was there, laptop and all.
Dense Breast Tissue, Thinner Answers
One of my brother's best friends was just diagnosed with breast cancer at age 33. When he told me, I was taken right back to when my friend Lisa called me (on Christmas morning) to tell me she had the disease.
I've written a lot about my ATM gene mutation, and the strange, specific limbo of knowing you're at higher risk before anything's actually wrong. So when my co-founder Abby, who recently turned 40, mentioned she'd just found out at her mammogram that she has dense breasts, I knew exactly where that conversation would go next. She left with a piece of critical, potentially life-saving health information — and basically no idea what to do with it.
As of September 2024, the FDA now requires every mammography facility in the country to tell patients whether their breasts are dense. Nearly half of women over 40 have dense tissue, and it's a two-for-one problem: it raises your baseline risk and makes cancer harder to spot on a mammogram, since dense tissue and tumors both show up white on the scan. So the women who most need a clear picture are the ones most likely to get a blurry one.
What the FDA doesn't require is what happens after. No mention of a supplemental ultrasound, no explanation of what your actual risk percentage is, just a sentence, maybe a pamphlet, and the door.
When I found out about my ATM mutation, I was told I'd need regular scans for the rest of my life, full stop, with a new prescription required every single time. So I did the research myself and wrote it all down here.
Lisa didn't get the years to figure any of this out. The least the rest of us can do is not have to start from zero.
I Used to Exercise to Be Skinny. Now I Lift to Stay Strong.
For most of my twenties, I exercised to be smaller. Not stronger, not healthier, smaller. The metric was always the same: take up less space, burn more than you consumed, earn your weekend. I didn't think about what my body could do, only what it looked like, as one does when they live out their teen years in the early 2000s.
But somewhere in my thirties, that (thankfully) changed. After infertility, two high-risk pregnancies, and watching my body do things I genuinely didn't think it was capable of, I started moving differently, wanting to feel capable and strong instead of small. I started strength training and Pilates to build instead of shrink, and the difference in my joints, my energy, my general sense of stability has not been subtle.
What I didn't know when I made that shift was how much it mattered for my bones specifically. Women can lose up to 20% of their bone density in the five to seven years following menopause, so the window to build bone mass that protects you later is right now, in your 30s and 40s, while estrogen is still doing its job. Strength training is one of the most evidence-backed ways to support bone density, and collagen, which makes up about 90% of your bone's organic structure, is the other piece most of us are missing entirely.
I used to exercise to look a certain way. Now I exercise because I want to be strong at 70 — a completely different relationship with my own body, and one I'd be proud to pass on to my daughter.
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10 Things That Are Worth the Money: Women's Health Edition
There's a trend going around on social media called "things that are worth the money," and forty-five minutes into it, I'd added a Hatch alarm clock and the softest modal LAKE pajamas to my cart with zero recollection of ever typing "modal" into a search bar. Caraway cookware was in there too, along with Eight Sleep, a mattress cover that costs more than my first car and apparently regulates your body temperature all night — which, fine, sounds like a dream, but I already have three kids doing that job for free (badly, but for free).
Most people can barely afford groceries right now, so the whole trend feels a little tone-deaf. But it got me thinking about what's actually worth the money in my world, the stuff nobody's filming a haul about, and the stuff we still don't talk about enough.
So here's my list. Ten things worth the money, women's health edition:
A heating pad, for the nights my cramps decide they're in charge.
Pelvic floor PT, postpartum. Nobody tells you that peeing a little when you sneeze isn't a life sentence; it's a fixable thing.
A weighted blanket, for when my brain won't stop narrating.
HRT, for the hot flashes that show up uninvited and overstay their welcome.
An Oura ring. It has never once lied to me.
Therapy with someone who specializes in reproductive trauma, not someone hearing the word "transfer" for the first time in your session.
Dollar store ovulation strips, which work exactly as well as the fancy ones, for a fraction of the price.
A good vibrator. Does what it says on the box.
A doctor who listens, without checking the clock.
A Squatty Potty, because IBS doesn't care about your schedule.
None of it's glamorous, but it's the stuff most women would restock without thinking twice, which is more than I can say for the jade face roller collecting dust in my bathroom drawer.
What would you add to this list?!
Fibroids: The Group Chat Topic Nobody Started
Apparently up to 80% of women will develop a fibroid by the time they turn 50. I only found this out a few weeks ago, at age 37, which feels like exactly how most of us learn anything about our own bodies.
Bethenny Frankel talked about hers on Real Housewives years ago: the heavy bleeding, the exhaustion she mistook for burnout, a doctor who casually offered her a hysterectomy like it was the only available option. Lupita Nyong'o's fibroids came back too, and she's now up to 77 of them, still being offered the same two options: surgery or living with the pain. Two very different women, same script, symptoms brushed off as a heavy period or a stubborn UTI, until someone finally calls it what it is.
Nearly half of the 600,000 hysterectomies performed in the U.S. every year are done for fibroids, and close to 60% of those women never tried a less invasive option first.
I can't help but think about all the women who had their uterus removed without ever knowing what their other options were. And then again, I just interviewed Dr. Cheruba Prabakar, aka "The Fibroid Doc," who told me about a young patient who was just done. Done with the pain, done with the discomfort, certain she didn't want kids, and wanted the ability to make that choice for herself.
Newer treatments exist, but that's not really the point. The point is a hysterectomy shouldn't be the only door someone's shown, and it shouldn't be a door that's closed to her either.
It should just be a choice — hers.
Mr. Darcy Is the Original "If He Wanted To, He Would"
I'm not ashamed to admit it: Pride and Prejudice is my entire personality right now.
What I am a little ashamed to admit is that I hadn't read it until now, at 37, with a B.A. in English and almost ten years in book publishing on my resume. I spent a decade selling other people's stories, and somehow the most famous love story in the English language just sat there, waiting for me to have no professional reason to pick it up.
TBH, I've always been a little intimidated by the classics. Call it PTSD from reading for school, and then for work, for fifteen-plus years straight, but the "must-reads" everyone referenced always felt more like things I should want to read than things I actually did. So they piled up. And I let them.
Then I finally picked it up, crushed it in a week, and my takeaway? Everything they said. All of it. Completely true.
And Mr. Darcy — look, the man is the original "if he wanted to, he would." A hero who had to earn it. A woman who turned down the wrong proposal, held out for actual mutual respect, and didn't apologize for either. Written by someone who rejected a perfectly respectable marriage proposal herself, published under a pen name because that was the only way she could get the words out at all.
Austen knew exactly what women wanted and exactly what they deserved. She just put it on paper two hundred years before we had the language for it.