Part of the reason that some non-hormonal birth control methods seem to have gained such traction on social media is that there is a tendency among some medical professionals to downplay the side effects of hormonal birth control methods that many women experience. Most women who use birth control are completely or somewhat satisfied with their methods of choice, but a minority of them experience reactions unpleasant enough to seriously impede their daily lives.
Over the years, I have heard anecdotally about — and experienced — various side effects to different types of contraception: heavy breakthrough bleeding and abdominal pain with IUDs, mood disturbances with different types of pills, and sexual side effects with everything. Discussion of these issues, often confined to intimate chats among women, was aired out in a great extended bit from the comedian Beth Stelling’s new Netflix special, in which she recounts the various kinds of birth control she’s “experimented recreationally” with over the years. “In my 30s,” she says, “I started taking the pill, just ’cause I wanted to know what it would be like to be a different person.” She asks audience members for their experiences with a particular pill before whipping out a pair of reading glasses and going over a list of potential side effects about another, including vomiting, abdominal cramps, depression and rashes.
As Sara Cravatts reported for Stat in 2021, in an article headlined “Patients and doctors are clashing about side effects of hormonal birth control,” many younger patients have been raised to advocate more assertively for themselves and for their bodily autonomy:
They want physicians to spend more time questioning potential side effects of hormonal contraception and less time questioning the validity of patients’ claims. But some physicians say without data that point to the prevalence of some side effects, they find it difficult to respond. Some choose not to engage at all.
And that lack of engagement leaves patients feeling dismissed, Cravatts wrote. When women — particularly women of color, whose pain has a long history of being undervalued — feel dismissed by the medical establishment, that leaves the door open for all manner of snake oil salesmen.
A paucity of open discussion between doctors and patients about the side effects of hormonal contraceptive methods also allows information to be politicized by those looking to undermine birth control more generally, as Kat Tenbarge reported in a July article for NBC News about how conservative influencers were weaponizing rare issues with hormonal contraceptives that didn’t have solid data behind them.
As Dr. Kate White, the vice chair of academics in obstetrics and gynecology at Boston Medical Center, told me over the phone, “what is happening is that people who have not been listened to, who have been disregarded, are then turning to sources that are not only not board-certified but also have their own agendas to push. And then they’re making decisions out of fear and misinformation.” Particularly in a post-Roe universe, she said, that is “tragic, because at a time that people need more autonomy over their bodies and more information about what the consequences of their choices about what using methods or not using methods means for them, they’re actually working in more of an information vacuum.”