Beyond Thalidomide (2024-2029), funded by an ERC Starting Grant pioneers a history of the global rise of patient engagement with drug-related disability in the second half of the twentieth century to understand how newly empowered agents transformed conceptions of (reproductive) health and disease in science and society. It develops a framework to examine the origins, development, and consequences of patient engagement with antenatal drug use, iatrogenic disability, and reproductive health from the 1960s until today. 

The project maps the conditions of patient engagement with antenatal drug use and reconstructs how patient action created political and scientific urgency starting in 1960. Their multifaceted activities resulted in clashes between different forms of knowledge and expertise that connected actors in the “global South” and “North”—from Latin America through Central Africa, India, and Europe—in the enforcement, implementation, and stabilization of reproductive health approaches that addressed the emerging challenges to democracy and civil society, beyond traditional accounts of expert-led iatrogenic risk management.