Dear Readers,

I’ll begin with a confession: our original inspiration for the spring 2006 issue of P.H. was to dedicate ourselves to analyzing “Women’s Health,” not “Reproductive Health.” Rightly or wrongly, P.H.’s editorial board finally convinced itself that running an entire issue about women might dissuade men on campus from picking up a copy. Even if the average Yale male were interested in women’s health, would he really feel secure enough about his masculinity to be seen in a dining hall reading a magazine with the words “Women’s Health” emblazoned on the cover?

“Reproductive Health,” on the other hand, ought to pique everyone’s interest. If, as I have suggested before, the world will someday remember the current generation of college students as the ‘public health generation,’ reproductive health will be remembered as the catalyst that got everyone interested in public health in the first place. For American college students, sexually transmitted diseases, contraception, and abortion are not abstract, intellectual curiosities: they form a vivid part of our everyday idiom.

Although none of the following articles focus exclusively on women, at bottom, every story we tell in this number is a story about gender. According to Emily Morell and Rachel Hansen, gender politics lie at the center of Africa’s AIDS epidemic. Whereas condoms place the life-or-death decision of preventing AIDS entirely in the hands of men, the development of a microbicide gel could give African women the power to protect themselves from the disease without having to rely on their sexual partners. As Andrew Chang convincingly demonstrates, the advent of better and better DNA technologies is making it impossible for anonymous male donors to remain truly anonymous to their curious off-spring. The dream of unencumbered male sexuality, always more a fantasy than a reality, did not survive the twentieth century. It needs no elegy. If during the sixties the idealistic youth in the West discovered free love, over the last forty years the world has learned how expensive love really is.

Sincerely,

Christopher Glazek
Editor-in-Chief