i drank the anti-birth control kool-aid and all i got was an existential crisis
no one is immune to propaganda (no, not even you)
It’s February 2020. January’s World War III memes had long faded into the meme periphery and we’d moved on to laughing at this picture of Trump that was making the rounds online. Those of us who regularly paid attention to the news were starting to become concerned about COVID-19. I’d just quit the service industry after over a decade of working in restaurants to work from home full time. I was the most depressed I’d been in a very long time, and was desperate to figure out why.
One day, I came across a TikTok of Dr. Sarah Hill’s TED Talk about women’s brains on birth control. Out of desperation for any sort of relief, my brain latched onto the possibility of birth control causing my depression and down the rabbit hole I went. I spent at least a week obsessively reading article after article about birth control and mental health and sought out the stories of others who quit taking their birth control and experienced an improvement in their mental health.
Then I started to question why I was taking it at all (other than my obvious desire to avoid an unwanted pregnancy, which is a pretty damn good reason on its own). My algorithm started feeding me videos disparaging birth control and talking about how horrible it is for our bodies. With every video that came across my for you page, my doubts increased. I started asking myself, What if my birth control has actually turned me into an entirely different person? What if I stop taking it and am no longer attracted to my partner? What if it’s the cause of my depression? What if I could stop taking it and feel better?
After some consideration and discussing and agreeing on alternatives with my partner, I decided to quit, just to see what would happen. It did not go well. In fact, I was an absolute wreck the entire five months I wasn’t taking it. I asked my partner to describe me during that time period and he said that I was “a lot,” “very intense,” and “normal during the day but highly emotional and distraught at night.” My moods were difficult to keep up with. I’d go from feeling elated to distraught in the blink of an eye. Every time it happened, it felt like that first big drop on a roller coaster; I could sense it was coming but couldn’t do anything to stop it. Eventually, it would escalate to the point of a weeks-long existential crisis that had me terrified to fall asleep every night.
It’s worth mentioning that it’s very normal for someone who discontinues birth control to experience mood swings as their body adjusts to the lack of hormones. I assume that was a factor for me. I’d also go out on a limb and say that the pandemic didn’t help the cause either. However, now that I’m long out of those woods, I can say with absolute certainty that the high highs, low lows, and the severe anxiety I experienced during that brief stint without birth control were the very same mood symptoms I had been living with long before I’d ever started taking it. Of course, when I decided to quit, my judgement was clouded by all the misinformation I’d been exposed to about birth control and my own desperation to not be depressed anymore.
After five months of feeling completely unhinged, I’d finally had enough and made a virtual appointment at my local Planned Parenthood to get a new birth control prescription. After I started taking it again, the difference in my mood was night and day. Was I still depressed? Yes—likely because I was undergoing a major transition in my life and, well, it was winter in Portland and I likely hadn’t seen the sun since October. Oh, and maybe because I’d been experiencing long bouts of depression with varying severity since 2009 and chronic depression tends to be cyclical.
But being back on the pill, I felt calmer. I felt stable. I was no longer being held hostage by my own fluctuating moods (and nor was my partner). Later that year, I would be diagnosed with PMDD and learn that my birth control had actually been stabilizing my mood the entire time I was on it. Now? You’ll have to pry my norenthindrone out of my dead, pregnant, or menopausal hands.
I don’t talk about this particular experience of mine very often. Frankly, I find the whole ordeal pretty embarrassing because I always thought of myself as someone who would be immune to falling for propaganda. I think most of us would like to believe that about ourselves. However, the pipeline from normal, nuanced thought to extremism is insidious. Misinformation and disinformation rely on on half-truths to feign credibility, and this is especially true for something like birth control because of real issues that exist within our healthcare system.
Women and gender diverse individuals are criminally underrepresented in medical research and often subjected to medical gaslighting, malpractice, and delayed diagnoses. Many people have horrible experiences with the side effects of certain types of birth control and struggle to get any relief from their doctors, who insist that the birth control can’t possibly be the problem. Many are given birth control without any further investigation into the distressing symptoms they’re experiencing. Not to mention the very ugly history of unethical medical experimentation on and forced sterilization of Black and Indigenous people in the U.S. that contributes to a rightful distrust of the system.
These are all completely valid reasons to be skeptical of our healthcare system, and there are plenty of other reasons to feel that way as well. However, they also serve as very effective fuel for the anti-birth control movement, because when disenfranchised people have nowhere else to turn, they’ll seek out people who appear to have the answers they so desperately seek. Most of the time, the ones with the “answers” are people who aren’t even remotely qualified to be giving anyone any sort of medical advice.
In the five years since my own disastrous attempt to quit birth control, the anti-birth control movement has exploded. I regularly encounter people online saying that birth control is “poison” and “destroys women’s bodies” because of the side effects that many people experience while taking it. In fact, I just got into my first comment section argument in years over this very topic, because I’m of the belief that this rhetoric is dangerous and needlessly demonizes a medication that has been revolutionary for women’s autonomy.
It’s especially dangerous given the deliberate erosion of reproductive rights with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the harmful abortion laws that have since gone into effect in multiple U.S. states, and now, the new regime and the uncertainty of whether they’ll continue the trend or leave things as is (which is still not good, by the way).
Perhaps the most frustrating part of this is that the average “birth control is poison” believer in an Instagram comment section means well and truly believes that they’re helping people by spreading this gospel. More likely than not, they’ve had a bad experience themselves—maybe even a life threatening one—and don’t want anyone else to go through what they did.
However, there’s a world of difference between saying, “Hey, there are side effects and risks you should be aware of before deciding to take this medication” and “Birth control is poison and will destroy your body.” It is entirely possible to talk about our negative experiences with birth control without writing it off entirely. It’s possible to not want to take birth control without demanding the same of others. Hell, it’s even possible to not believe in contraception at all without forcing that belief onto others. (First Amendment who??)
While the average anti-birth control crusader may be well-intentioned, there’s no denying that there’s a deliberate effort to turn people away from hormonal contraception, instead promoting a variety of “natural” methods as the alternative. To each their own, obviously, but let’s not pretend that there isn’t an ulterior motive for sowing distrust in certain types of birth control. For some, it’s religous belief. For others, it’s that plus a sprinkle of blatant disdain for people who dare have sex beyond the confines of marriage. As for the rest, well, they’re probably trying to sell you something—it could be a fertility tracking app, a supplement, or maybe a class on how to “balance your hormones.”
Either way, anti-birth control propaganda harms far more than it helps. We all deserve the freedom and autonomy to make our own decisions about whether we use birth control. We all deserve to be able to do so without being subjected to misinformation and fear mongering and without having our concerns dismissed by the people who are supposed to help us.
Ultimately, my experience is uniquely my own. For every person like me who feels exponentially better on birth control than off it, there’s someone who experiences the polar opposite. For every person who needs it for their own health issues, there’s another who can’t use it because of theirs. Regardless of which camp you fall into, do yourself a favor and don’t drink the kool-aid!
A post script—
Thank you for taking the time out of your day to read this installment of unraveling. Please note that this is not meant to be a hard hitting informational piece of journalistic quality about the anti-birth control movement.
I’m just here to share my thoughts on whatever happens to tickle my fancy at any given moment and this particular experience of mine just so happened to be the focus of this week’s brainwaves.
If I’ve said anything that’s blatantly false, do let me know. If you’d like to read more about the anti-birth control movement, here are some pieces I found interesting:
The Fight Against Birth Control Is Already Here — Slate
Inside Anti-Abortion Groups’ Campaign to Sell Women on Unreliable Birth Control “Alternatives” — Mother Jones
Contraception moves into the political spotlight — Politico Newsletter
Conservative influencers are pushing an anti-birth control message — NBC
Until next time,
Hannah