For black women, medical racism often overshadows medical sexism. For poor women of all ethnic groups, the problem of how to get services of any kind often overshadows all qualitative concerns…. A movement that recognizes our biological similarity but denies the diversity of our priorities cannot be a women’s health movement, it can only be some women’s health movement. (Ehrenreich and English, 1973:86, italics in original)

The speculum was not a reductionist symbolic and material tool that limited the feminist health movement to the politics of ‘choice’ defined by demands for legal, safe abortion and attention to the new reproductive technologies. Nor was the speculum definitive of an exclusivist, middleclass, white movement. The women’s health movement was actively built, and often pioneered, by women of colour and their specific organizations, as well as by mixed and largely white groups that cut across class lines.6 That legacy is too often forgotten in the terrible history of racism, class-blindness, generational arrogance and fragmentation in American feminism, as well as in other sectors of US progressive politics. However, the fullest meanings of reproductive freedom critical to feminist technoscience politics cannot easily be signified by the gynaecological speculum, nor by the speculum of the computer terminal, no matter how important it remains to control, inhabit and shape those tools, both semiotically and materially. The loose configurations of millionaires and billionaires from Paul Simon’s song at the head of this essay still determines the nature of the US health system, including reproductive health, for everybody. The structure and consequences of that complex determination are what we must learn to see if ‘choice’ is to have a robust meaning. The last verse of Simon’s ‘The Boy in the Bubble’ reminds us that the relentless bursts of ‘information’—in transnational and rural jungles-are a long-distance call we cannot ignore.