Student Blog Issue #3: Paulina Pimentel-Mora is a current MPhil student in Health, Medicine, and Society at King’s College, Cambridge. With a background in sociology and extensive experience in higher education, admissions, and student advocacy, her work sits at the intersection of medical sociology, feminist theory, and digital cultures. Her research explores how reproductive health is shaped by market forces, corporate interests, and emerging technologies - particularly within the context of media discourse and consumer culture. Paulina is committed to critically examining how health knowledge is produced, circulated, and experienced, especially by women and Generation Z. Paulina would like to thank her dissertation supervisor, Dr. Robert Pralat, as well as the HPS Department and Course Representatives, Farradeh Martin and Syd Haupt, for the opportunity to contribute to the HMS blog.
From hormone-balancing supplements and cryogenically frozen cord blood to sleekly designed menstrual tracking apps, today’s landscape of reproductive health is increasingly shaped by markets, platforms, and promises of optimization. Across wellness industries, biomedical infrastructures, and digital apps, reproduction is being reimagined as something to be curated, tracked, preserved – or purchased.
Over the past year, my postgraduate research for my MPhil in Health, Medicine, and Society degree has explored how reproductive health is transformed when it’s filtered through consumer logic and technological systems. At the center of this work is a recurring tension: what happens to reproductive autonomy when it is mediated by financial incentives, commercial narratives, and speculative futures?
This thread has taken me across seemingly disparate terrains – wellness branding, biomedicine, and reproductive tech – but each has offered a glimpse into how empowerment is increasingly defined by the ability to engage with market-driven models of care.
Take the wellness industry, for example. In my first essay, I examined how brands like Goop frame menopause not merely as a biological transition but as a curated life stage demanding hormonal and aesthetic control. The “solution” arrives in the form of supplements, detox programs, and "clean" beauty products, often wrapped in language that encourages women to view their bodies as both in need of fixing and worthy of luxury. In this framing, the consumer becomes both patient and lifestyle curator, encouraged to pursue self-knowledge and empowerment through the act of buying. But here, empowerment is filtered through access – to money, to information, and to particular cultural aesthetics. It’s less about bodily autonomy in the political sense, and more about an individualized, commodified version of control that’s deeply shaped by class and social capital.
This tension – between emotional appeal and economic exclusion – also surfaces in more clinical contexts, such as the practice of cord blood banking. Expectant parents are marketed a promise: pay now to store your baby’s umbilical cord blood and secure a form of biological insurance for the future. The appeal is powerful – it taps into love, fear, and the desire to do everything right. Yet the actual medical necessity is statistically rare. Here, too, we see risk itself becoming a commodity, and reproductive care turning into a speculative transaction – emotionally potent, financially burdensome, and rooted in privatized ideals of “good parenting.”
Even tools presented as purely digital, like menstrual tracking apps, carry these dynamics. Apps like Flo and Clue offer users insights into their bodies, moods, and fertility windows. Yet the data they gather is often monetized, and the apps can reinforce ideals of bodily productivity and internalized regulation. Menstruation, once a deeply personal and variable experience, is turned into a predictable, plottable pattern – one that syncs with work schedules and self-optimization routines. In the process, care becomes data, and autonomy becomes algorithmic.
Together, these examples reflect a larger shift: reproductive health is increasingly being reimagined as something that demands continuous management, investment, and alignment with market values. Empowerment, as it is often presented in these spaces, is inseparable from consumption.
These themes have directly informed my dissertation research, which explores how corporate fertility benefits – like employer-sponsored egg freezing – and fertility startups are framed in U.S. media discourse. Though both operate within the same privatized reproductive ecosystem, the narratives surrounding them diverge in telling ways.
Corporate fertility benefits are frequently portrayed as pragmatic solutions tied to workplace culture: tools for employee retention, family-friendly branding, and the management of work-life balance. Startups, by contrast, are often cast as disruptors – champions of innovation, female empowerment, and user-centered design. My project asks what these differing portrayals reveal about broader cultural anxieties and ideals surrounding gender, autonomy, and the role of private enterprise in shaping reproductive futures.
I’m not looking to render a final verdict on whether these interventions are “good” or “bad.” Many people find real value in them – sometimes even liberation – especially when traditional healthcare systems fall short. But I do think it’s essential to interrogate the underlying assumptions: Who has access to these technologies? What expectations do they set? And what kind of reproductive agency do they promote – or limit?
Ultimately, my research returns to one core question: When autonomy is framed as a choice between products or platforms, who is excluded from that conversation? And how are we being taught to understand our own reproductive agency?
In an era where reproductive health is increasingly branded, financialized, and digitized, it’s crucial to distinguish between empowerment as a marketing message and autonomy as a substantive right. One is often sold to us – the other must be continually demanded, defended, and reimagined within systems that don’t always prioritize equity or justice.
