Research on New Drugs and Pregnancy

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Researchers thought female bodies were too complicated because of the way hormons changed throughout the month. Even female animals got left out to make life simpler. Scientists would just take the data they collected on male rats or male rabbits or male humans and assume the response would be the same in females.

Until 1993, many researchers excluded women from clinical drug trials, leaving doctors in the dark about how new treatments work in more than half the population. This is the story of why that happened, the women who fought to change it, and what we still don’t know about how sex and gender affect health.

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