iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Kate Clancy @kateclancy.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

PREGNANCY INTERRUPTED in Newsweek:

"People joke a lot about, 'I've got a parasite eating me,'" she said. Others describe themselves as a "short-term rental" or compare a fetus to a tenant they cannot wait to evict.

“There's this oppositional language that people use when describing pregnancy,” Clancy said. “The science is much more cooperative. There are ways in which each is invested in the other's survival.”

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Kate Clancy @kateclancy.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

When does pregnancy begin? The lines we construct have implications for miscarriage, abortion, and more.

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Kate Clancy @kateclancy.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Engagement ENGAGE If you like these I'll keep doing them

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Kate Clancy @kateclancy.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

On that time (this morning) Dr. @tressiemcphd.bsky.social and @thisone0verhere.bsky.social made me cry: buttondown.com/KateClancy/a...

McMillan Cottom honors Dolly’s identity and skill as a writer, and given she’s a pretty spectacular writer herself, manages to put a beautiful line in, of all places, the caption. She says:

“Good writing doesn’t have to imagine everyone; it only has to imagine the truest thing about all of us that exists in each of us.”

And for whatever reason, I started to cry. Because my brain put that quote in conversation with another one I read recently by Jonathan Edward Durham, also mourning Dolly’s passing (also on Instagram – gotta cite my sources):

“We have to be the beautiful ones now.”

I loved Dolly Parton – in that she was an angel on earth, she gave to the right causes, she made explicit choices to never be a billionaire. I was glad someone like her existed, glad for the model we had of how good humans could be in the world.

But Dolly means more than that to people I care about, including people who spoke to me for my book. One person I interviewed, whose story did not end up in the book’s pages but was still very influential to my thinking, had a stillborn daughter and named her Dolly – and the name had many important origins, one of them being Dolly Parton. My book is dedicated to her, as well as the other stillborn children my interlocutors told me about.

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Kate Clancy @kateclancy.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Part of my Pregnancy Interrupted excerpt at @autonomynews.co: www.autonomynews.co/in-the-name-...

The pregnant person and fetus are entangled. They fundamentally cannot be neatly separated nor rank ordered. Yet across the history of medicine, we sure have tried. In her book Surgery and Salvation, the historian Elizabeth O’Brien explains how since its inception, the purpose of cesarean section has alternated between saving the life of the baby, saving the life of the mother, and saving both.

These documented shifts in popular and scientific understanding, which date from 715 B.C.E., reveal the fluctuating priority given to the fetus and the pregnant person. For instance, by the 16th century, there were two available ways to manage what was seen as a “hopeless” labor, in which both the parent and child were likely to die: cesarean section, which gave the fetus a chance at life, or what was called embryotomy, where the fetus was killed while still in the uterus and pulled through the cervix, giving the parent perhaps a greater chance to live. On living patients, cesareans were uncommon. In part, this was because there was no way to manage the pain inflicted by surgery. But more fundamentally, into the 18th century, canon law—the body of laws made by the Catholic church—held that one was forbidden from cutting into a person.

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Kate Clancy @kateclancy.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Out here in these streets handselling my book so more people understand how miscarriage is the gateway to understanding pregnancy surveillance and anti abortion rhetoric

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Kate Clancy @kateclancy.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Trimesters are made up! Eugenics is bad! Plastics increase genetic anomalies! Buy my book! Pub date 8/25!

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Kate Clancy @kateclancy.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

MY BOOK IS HERE (for me at least, you need to pre-order it right now!). Check out my unboxing (unenveloping?) video and me telling you about a few of the most feminist rage-y chapters. bookshop.org/p/books/preg...

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Kate Clancy @kateclancy.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

Also you guys the BACK COVER 😍😍😍

Photograph of my hand holding the hardcover copy of Pregnancy Interrupted: The Science & Stories of How Pregnancies Really End, showing the back cover with blurbs from the incredible Uche Blackstock, Jessica Zucker, Leah Hazard, and Juno Carey.

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Kate Clancy @kateclancy.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

My husband received his copy of Pregnancy Interrupted already, but I opened it first! bookshop.org/p/books/preg...

A photograph of my hand holding a hardcover edition of Pregnancy Interrupted: The Science & Stories of How Pregnancies Really End

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Kate Clancy @kateclancy.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

I hear the kids like short form video Pre-order PREGNANCY INTERRUPTED here: bookshop.org/p/books/preg...

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Kate Clancy @kateclancy.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

In fact, that's in the analysis too - tenure-stream faculty, for whom research is a major part of their contractual obligation and the foundation of the incentive structure for tenure and promotion, work more hours on average than NTT faculty:

What are faculty doing with their time when they aren’t teaching? FSSE data show that faculty report spending 40 to 57 percent of their time teaching. Although they teach less, tenured and tenure-track faculty members actually work around 15 percent longer hours compared to their nontenure-track peers and devote more time to both research and to service.

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Kate Clancy @kateclancy.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

Then, unis are increasingly spending money on other stuff, so we are a lower portion of the budget. Because our dept budgets are >90% salary faculty may not realize this. But remember that's because they're underfunding each dept & expecting us to find ways to "generate revenue" to do the rest.

Figure from The Faculty Workload Myth article in the Chronicle showing that since 2000 faculty salaries have become a lower and lower portion of most four year public university budgets. We are around 13% of the budget at this point.

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Kate Clancy @kateclancy.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

What a great article not only on faculty workloads, but how little our salaries actually factor in to most university budgets. A few highlights. First, our salaries are falling:

Third, faculty salaries are falling even if we statistically control for faculty rank and institution. By our analysis of National Center for Education Statistics data, tenured and tenure-track salaries are down 10 percent in real terms since 2016 and are lower today than they were in 2002; nontenured faculty salaries are down 4 percent since 2016 and are at 2002 levels today.

To put this plainly: Suppose sharply increased teaching loads enabled institutions to cut one out of every seven full-time faculty. (That’s roughly what we saw last year in severe cuts announced at West Virginia, Western Illinois, and St. Cloud State Universities.) The associated savings in salary and benefits even through such drastic action would amount to less than 2.5 percent of total institutional expenditures for the typical university.

The upshot? If you think higher education has a cost problem, squeezing more teaching out of faculty is not the first place you should look.

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Kate Clancy @kateclancy.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

My latest, on the impact of hormonal contraception on young adolescent brains. It matters to get the science right to confront MAHA rather than turn to some sort of science positivism every time they attack our disciplines. buttondown.com/KateClancy/a...

Enter hormonal contraception. When young people, whose brains are in a critical period where they are responding to and being organized by hormonal exposures, are prescribed hormonal contraception, they are replacing whatever hormonal exposures come from their endogenous (from within) hormones with an exogenous (from without) one. Exogenous, synthetic hormones may have a greater binding affinity – this means they can exert stronger effects via hormone receptors.

For a full-grown person not in a critical transition period, this may not matter. For a young person whose hormonal exposures are more variable (because of typical experiences of infrequent menstrual cycles, lower hormone concentrations, and anovulation) this could lead to significant differences in terms of how their tissues and organs differentiate and learn to respond to hormones.

Two big points to make here: First, there are many reasons a young person (and their caregiver) may be considering a hormonal treatment at this age: dysmenorrhea (painful periods) are very common, they may already be developing endometriosis, they may need a less easy-to-spot form of contraception, they may have premenstrual dysphoric disorder, they may be non-binary or trans – and a hundred other possibilities. Some of these are very, very important for quality of life, some are suicide prevention. There are a lot of phenomena out there where a hormonal treatment is the only feasible option, and the alternative is terrible.

Second, we need not fear change. That is, many, many factors influence our endogenous hormones and therefore also have reorganizing effects on the adolescent brain, from exercise to schooling to pandemics to authoritarian regimes to family separation to climate change to inciting joy. And so, we need not fear hormonal treatments simply because they influence the brain in some way. What we need to ask is, under certain circumstances and for certain bodies, are these treatment exposures influencing the brai…

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Kate Clancy @kateclancy.bsky.social · 30/05/2026

Reminds me of one of my favorite lactation rooms - a research institute where I was giving a talk, I actually forgot the name but it was I think the north shore of Massachusetts? www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

A photograph of a lactation room slash electrical closet in a research institute where I gave a talk a few years back

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Kate Clancy @kateclancy.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

New newsletter: my comments from a panel on the weaponization of Title VI. buttondown.com/KateClancy/a...

Today I’ll be arguing that Title IX and Title VI are legalistic mechanisms that create a sense of action, give sensitive information to people in power, but in the end do nothing to resolve issues of sexual misconduct or race-based discrimination. What’s remarkable to me is how they each manage to do this in effectively opposite ways: with Title IX in creating an atmosphere of fear to report, and in Title VI creating an atmosphere of fear to be reported. Complainants in Title IX processes are often additionally victims of social and professional retaliation, professional and educational consequences, and institutional betrayal. Respondents in Title VI processes are often additionally victims of social media campaigns and doxxing, professional consequences, and institutional betrayal. It’s a lose-lose situation.

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Kate Clancy @kateclancy.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

For the first time in over a month I had about an hour yesterday to do a little research - in this case some reading to complement archival work I've started. This quote from an early edition of Our Bodies Ourselves, on disrupting sexual shame, got to me (from Adams 2019 Peitho): 1/4

Picture a woman trying to do work and to enter into equal and satisfying relationships with other people—when she feels physically weak because she has never tried to be strong; when she drains her energy trying to change her face, her figure, her hair, her smells, to match some
ideal norm set by magazines, movies, and TV; when she feels confused and ashamed of the menstrual blood that every month appears from some dark place in her body; when her internal body processes are a mystery to her and surface only to cause her trouble (an unplanned
pregnancy, or cervical cancer); when she does not understand nor enjoy sex and concentrates her sexual drives into aimless romantic fantasies, perverting and misusing a potential energy because she has been brought up to deny it. (Preface to Our Bodies, Ourselves 1973; emphasis added)

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Kate Clancy @kateclancy.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

They Survived Sex Trafficking - Then ICE Detained Them www.thecut.com/article/sex-...

Within months, Flora became pregnant again as a result of the repeated sexual violence. (Flora is not her real name — we’re protecting her identity owing to safety concerns. Our account of her experience is based on legal documents The Cut reviewed and interviews with her legal team; The Guardian was the first outlet to report her story.) She gave birth to her second child and, in early 2025, was able to escape her alleged trafficker with the help of a local nonprofit organization. Flora fled to the DMV and took refuge in a church. The man then allegedly stalked her, threatening to report her to immigration authorities and take her children away; Flora obtained a restraining order against him and was able to connect with the nonprofit Human Trafficking Legal Center for assistance. On January 30, the Center helped her report her alleged trafficker to federal authorities. On the same day, the unthinkable happened: Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained Flora at a routine check-in appointment and shipped her 1,200 miles away to a detention center in Louisiana, separating her from her 4-year-old son and 18-month-old daughter.

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Kate Clancy @kateclancy.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

Well if it isn't a late Friday cover reveal!!! My book PREGNANCY INTERRUPTED: The Science & Stories of How Pregnancies Really End, out August 25th. 🧪

The cover of the book Pregnancy Interrupted: The Science & Stories of How Pregnancies Really End by Kate Clancy. Features a zoomed in ultrasound image of an empty gestational sac as the background, with the book title in a grayish pink color in the foreground. This book will make you sad and angry and happy so I think you should read it.

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Kate Clancy @kateclancy.bsky.social · 17/02/2026

Instead I want to share just one more: some of the retirees after they OCCUPIED A BUILDING because of how their pension was being mismanaged by Yale. DON'T FORGET YOUR RETIREES, ORGANIZERS, THEY ARE ABSOLUTE BADASSES.

A photograph of a few Yale retirees speaking at a press conference after occupying a building because they are fucking badass. Early 2000s, New Haven CT.

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Kate Clancy @kateclancy.bsky.social · 17/02/2026

Ok I found more pictures and I'm pretty sure that was 2003, not 2005, the first strike I participated in. But now I'm going down memory lane and, while I'm tempted to share the blizzard strike photos...

Jesse Jackson, I think in 2003 not 2005, speaking to a crowd at a rally in New Haven CT.

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Kate Clancy @kateclancy.bsky.social · 17/02/2026

Jesse Jackson at one of our UNITE HERE union events, probably around 2005, New Haven CT. I think I got to shake his hand. Mostly I just remember being proud to be an organizer and getting to live in moments of solidarity like this, following the lead of Jackson and those he taught.

Photograph of a rally in New Haven CT somewhere around 2005. A crowd in the foreground, Jesse Jackson maybe ten to fifteen feet from the photographer (me). If I remember correctly he participated in a rally and spoke.

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Kate Clancy @kateclancy.bsky.social · 17/02/2026

Are you a normal person trying to get, like, concert tickets, or are you me, waiting until 10am EST to click a link to sign up for your first hyrox solo?

Photo of an email with information about the NYC Hyrox 2026, with access code information scribbled out.

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Kate Clancy @kateclancy.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

I had a new experience this week - the USPS somehow bungled/destroyed my @bookshop.org order and so what arrived at my door was a cutout of the shipping label, covered in a plastic bag with this message:

Small piece of cardboard wrapped in plastic where the plastic reads UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE, WE CARE, Dear Postal Customer, We sincerely regret the damage to your mail during handling by the Postal Service. We hope this incident did not inconvenience you. We realize that your mail is important to you and that you have every right to expect it to be delivered in good condition....(there's more but it doesn't really matter)... Please accept our apologies. Sincerely, Your Postmaster

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Kate Clancy @kateclancy.bsky.social · 26/01/2026

No dog (sorry!). Only cat. You like: Cat with tongue blep? Or cat in bag?

Black medium haired cat closeup with very pink tongue blep

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Kate Clancy @kateclancy.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

Kinda forgot to mention I'm going to be on a webinar panel tomorrow (16 Dec) for UN Women and ITU on Addressing Sexual Harassment Against Women in the Tech Sector - 8:30am EST. Free to join! unwomen.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

Poster that reads SAVE THE DATE - WEBINAR Addressing Sexual Harassment Against Women in the Tech Sector. 16 December 2025. 8:30-10am EST. Organised by UN Women, ITU, and the Action Coalition on Technology and Innovation for Gender Equality

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Kate Clancy @kateclancy.bsky.social · 29/10/2025

Trying to share this quote and the link to @tressiemcphd.bsky.social's excellent column in the same post is not working for me - link in next post. But as usual, brilliant all the way through.

These senators are demonstrating a willful blindness that has become endemic in the Democratic Party. Their rhetoric — and the conventional wisdom that flows from it — suggests that we cannot talk about economic solutions without abandoning our commitment to the Black, Latino, gay, transgender and female poor that are the lifeblood of the Democratic Party’s base. The conceit at the heart of that belief is that poor white people are too racist, and too uniquely ignorant of their racism, to vote in their best interests. Therefore, Democrats have to accept a little racism to win the working class.

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Kate Clancy @kateclancy.bsky.social · 16/07/2025

So I know this is excessively stupid of me but I already have an idea for the next book, & it has led to reading about the women's health movement in the 1970s. And I need you to know how they originally tried to recruit people for the Nurses Health Study: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

With promising results from the US pilot studies, Speizer, who was at Harvard Medical School at the time, submitted a National Cancer Institute grant application that was eventually successful. However, by the time the funding was received in 1974, the follow-up questionnaire was revised to cover a 2-year period and needed to be repiloted. In the second pilot mailing, questionnaires were addressed to 3 groups on the basis of responses from the first pilot: “Doctor, give this to your wife,” “Ms,” and “Mrs.” The worst response came from the “Ms” group. Women who were married and aged 30 to 55 years in 1974 did not like to be called “Ms.” The most important information came from the “Mrs” group, in that a substantial portion of the women in this group reported that they had not seen the initial questionnaire. Their physician husbands had presumably filled out the form for them. We therefore redirected the effort to nurses, because we believed it was important to have a medically sophisticated group of study participants.

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Kate Clancy @kateclancy.bsky.social · 15/06/2025

I don't have good pictures of our Chambana protest but it was big - thousands of folks despite it being summer when we're 50,000 students short. We were maybe a third from the front once we got marching and I couldn't see the end.

Photograph with people blurred from the No Kings March in Urbana, IL. My favorite sign from this image reads "From Palestine to Mexico all the walls have got to go"

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Kate Clancy @kateclancy.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

I'm co-leading an organizing training tomorrow and it feels good to be doing the work in this way again. If you're in Chambana, this is open to all! Registration: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Poster for the UIUC Campus Faculty Association Organizing Training happening tomorrow, May 8, 12-1:30pm at the Clark Lounge at the University YMCA. While the focus will be on campus organizing it's for anyone looking to pick up some basic organizing skills.

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Kate Clancy @kateclancy.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

You mean to tell me not only that @edyong209.bsky.social's young readers edition of An Immense World is almost out, but that @roseveleth.com is narrating??? <swoons>

An image of the audiobook cover of An Immense World Young Readers Edition by Ed Yong, read by Rose Eveleth.

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Kate Clancy @kateclancy.bsky.social · 11/04/2025

Excel does not like this. The closest chart type I can figure out is stacked data, but then it adds the implantation day numbers to the ovulation day numbers so it looks like implantation day is like day 43 (in the data it's 27). 2/2

An annoying and highly inaccurate chart looking at ovulation and implantation days where I'm redrawing data from an existing paper to make a point in my upcoming book. The article it's from, which is fantastic, is Mahendru et al 2012 Ultrasound Obstet Gynecol. The data shown in this image are not an accurate representation of the data in the paper. This is a very silly problem.

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Kate Clancy @kateclancy.bsky.social · 08/04/2025

There is a straight line between the eagerness with which universities prosecuted student protestors last year and the aggression of the Trump administration in their revocations of student visas. My comments from yesterday's UIUC Academic Senate meeting: 1/4

My name is Kate Clancy, I’m a senator from Anthropology. I also serve on the senate committee for student discipline. I will speak on the connection between the university response to last year’s encampment and the visa revocations now hitting our campus. Last April, brave students and community members stood together to protest Palestinian genocide and work towards divestment. University administration called the cops. The cops initiated physical contact with protestors, and one protestor was pushed to the ground by an officer and ended up concussed.
Over the summer, campus administrators worked to revise the campus administrative manual and UIPD spent countless hours coming up with things to charge protestors with. UIPD sent a number of reports to the Office for Student Conflict Resolution, and several students were investigated through the student discipline system in addition to the nine students and community members who still face legal charges.
At any point the university could have considered its obligations to academic freedom, the right to protest, the safety of the campus and broader community, and come to different conclusions. They could have contacted OSCR and had disciplinary investigations halted. They could have contacted the UIPD and discouraged additional detective work. They could have spoken to the States Attorney to ask that she drop the charges. Instead the university facilitated punishment and abandoned their students.
The university’s actions last year unlocked the door for Trump and his cronies, and they have now blown it open. Students – we don’t know who or how many, or whether there will be more – have had their visas revoked. They must flee the country or risk being taken on the street and detained like Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, and countless others. (Alt text continued in next post.)

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Kate Clancy @kateclancy.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

Went to the Urbana-Champaign rally and there were easily over a thousand people, maybe two thousand. It's a blue town but not densely populated, and we're surrounded by red. Saw lots of friends but also lots of folks I didn't recognize.

Photograph of Kate and her kids at a rally with the faces of other folks blurred out because she's not a cop

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Kate Clancy @kateclancy.bsky.social · 24/03/2025

UIUC/Chambana rally at noon today on the quad! BREAK THE SILENCE BREAK THE FEAR Organized in coalition w UC Jews for Ceasefire, CU Muslim Action Committee, GEO, UIUC FJP, & many many more. Show the university our collective power, that we stand with Mahmoud Khalil, that we keep ourselves safe

Image of UIUC's statue Alma Mater with a red bar over its mouth. Text reads: BREAK THE SILENCE. BREAK THE FEAR.

AN ISRAELI APARTHEID WEEK EVENT
MONDAY MARCH 24 @ NOON
ILLINI PLAZA ON THE QUAD

"In the weeks ahead, students, advocates, and elected officials must unite to defend the right to protest for Palestine. At stake are not just our voices, but the fundamental civil liberties of all." -- Mahmoud Khalil, political prisoner

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Kate Clancy @kateclancy.bsky.social · 04/02/2025

Well just received this email regarding a paper under review:

Screenshot of an email that reads: "Dear Authors,

As you may know, the new presidential administration in the United States has issued Executive Orders, including one that impacts foreign aid. 

As part of these Executive Orders, USAID-funded projects have received stop work orders. Given the circumstance, we must stop all work on Global Health: Science and Practice. As such, I regret that we will have to postpone processing submitted papers. We know that a lot of work has gone into preparing your paper. Please feel free to take your manuscript elsewhere.

Thank you for your understanding and cooperation during this challenging time.  

Sincerely,

Natalie Culbertson
Managing Editor
Global Health: Science and Practice Journal"

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Kate Clancy @kateclancy.bsky.social · 22/01/2025

16) I love how my little one looked today at the dentist's office in the outfit she put together herself and sunglasses to protect her from the bright light.

A photograph of a redheaded seven year old in a dentist's chair wearing big rubber boots, a sparkly skirt, and hot pink sunglasses.

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Kate Clancy @kateclancy.bsky.social · 10/11/2024

Sorry, I've now looked at the paper and what they say in the intro supports what I've read elsewhere. Please let me know if I'm misunderstanding something.

Introduction of JAMA paper that reads Homicide is a leading cause of death for pregnant women in the US. More women die from pregnancy associated homicide (while pregnant or in the year after pregnancy) than other causes of maternal mortality such as preeclampsia or hemorrhage.

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Kate Clancy @kateclancy.bsky.social · 30/10/2024

Let it be known that I did not open our Halloween candy until the evening of the 29th of October even though we had Reese's pumpkins. My favorite detail: pretty sure the "decorating suggestion" is because of a lawsuit last year.

Photograph of my hand holding an empty Reese's pumpkins wrapper

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Kate Clancy @kateclancy.bsky.social · 17/09/2024

Woooooooooooooooo leaving Twitter early has given me an arbitrary sense of accomplishment as an early adopter of this other social platform!!!

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Kate Clancy @kateclancy.bsky.social · 22/08/2024

And wouldn't you know it, my advance copy of my paperback showed up today!

Photograph of Kate Clancy holding a paperback copy of her book Period: The Real Story of Menstruation.

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