So When Did The Internet Start Hating Birth Control?
Words: Maya Walsh-Little
As a sex educator across many schools throughout Brooklyn, I’m often only around ten minutes into a birth control workshop when I inevitably get the question again. “I heard on TikTok it will completely mess up your hormones if you take birth control. Is that true?”
This isn’t just a singular instance at one school with one student, it’s almost guaranteed to come up in every class I teach if I mention the words “birth control”. I can’t blame the students who raise these questions. The reality is that I’ve seen the same stories on my own For You page. From cautionary tales of influencers detailing how birth control wrecked their bodies, to messaging encouraging young people to steer away from any form of hormonal contraceptive, to blatant misinformation on birth control side effects and risks. Internalising any of that information, especially from an internet figure you trust, might make even the most enthusiastic birth control advocates question themselves.
Living in a political climate after the overturn of Roe v. Wade has created even more pressure for sex educators to do their job of providing education in an individualised, trauma-informed way to ensure every person has the tools they need to make the right sexual health choices for themselves. So, you can understand the concern that has risen due to what seems like a drastic cultural shift in the internet’s attitudes towards birth control, in a time where abortion restrictions are increasing and low access to medically accurate sexual health information is escalating.
The conservative agenda has seemingly seeped its way into TikTok narratives around birth control by emphasising how using birth control can have irreparable effects including infertility and hormonal imbalances. Whether or not it’s conscious on creators’ parts, scaring viewers out of using hormonal birth control isn’t education, it’s blatant fearmongering.
Prescription birth control absolutely has side effects, and is certainly not the right option for everyone, but declaring that non-hormonal methods like fertility awareness practices are inherently better, and even validating misinformed claims, have dangerous consequences. Sexually active people have a right to understand all of their pregnancy prevention options, hormonal and non hormonal alike. However, this wave of birth control hate on social media isn’t random or unexpected: it’s actually in perfect alignment with right wing efforts to control and limit reproductive health options.
So, why are potential birth control users turning to the internet for medical advice in the first place? The answer might lie in the common thread between conservative politicians, the medical industrial complex, and mainstream cultural values at large: people want to feel heard in a world that, on a grand scale, ignores and dismisses the reproductive wellbeing of people with uteruses. In all of these spaces, sexual autonomy is not at the front and centre. From the politician saying IUDs threaten infertility, to the medical provider telling a patient that the best birth control option is the implant, to the influencer on your “for you page” saying you should take a holistic approach to birth control if you care about your health, the particular needs and wants of each potential birth control user are not being heard.
“Acknowledging the reality of coercion around using or not using hormonal birth control is essential to understanding how misinformed birth control rhetoric online is perpetuated and regurgitated.”
The long history of coercive medical practices as it relates to birth control, especially for Black and Indigenous communities, has created ample reason to distrust hormonal birth control, and seek out other avenues of information. For anyone, without taking a comprehensive sex education class or having any sort of background in sexual health knowledge, you might not be fully informed about all of the possible pregnancy prevention options along with their potential side effects just by walking into a clinic.
If medical providers, as has happened in the past and continues to this day, are pressuring users into a specific type of birth control, they are not doing their due diligence as medical professionals to provide informed consent and are poorly prescribing without truly internalizing the wants of each patient. This prescriptive approach (both metaphorically and literally) doesn’t allow for patients to be the experts on themselves, which we know they are.
Acknowledging the reality of coercion around using or not using hormonal birth control is essential to understanding how misinformed birth control rhetoric online is perpetuated and regurgitated. When birth control is treated as a “one size fits all” decision, we are all collectively being failed by virtue of being stripped of our right to reproductive autonomy and individuality. As influencers are spewing non-scientific claims and anti-birth control propaganda that is being reverberated throughout social media, this bias can sway current and potential birth control users to abandon hormonal options altogether. While people are entitled to share their experiences around birth control and educate others about the side effects, this doesn’t include pushing an agenda that delegitimises all hormonal contraceptive options and is based on unfounded pseudo-health opinions.
The influx of birth control hate may be a symptom of a bigger mission to control reproductive health options as formed by conservative values around sex and gender roles. Seeing how these right wing traditional expectations have infiltrated even other internet trends like the “tradwife” movement reveal a regression of sex norms that have trickled down from political action into influencer propaganda. By curating a sense of powerlessness over one’s range of sexual health choices, this type of control is able to thrive and continue to exploit individuals.
Through recognising how the medical field has pressured, and even forced, individuals into birth control, we can understand how this distrust in birth control creates a breeding ground of myths and misinformation. Politicians leveraging the lack of education around contraception and medical malpractice is what empowers the distorted birth control information from influencers to continue to circulate, which ultimately takes away each person’s right to informed choice.
So, when I’m confronted with how to address the negative messaging around birth control in my classes, I’m eager to validate why this question would come up in light of the birth control propaganda being fed to us online. However, ultimately what I’m emphasising is that the most empowered choice related to contraceptive use arises when evidence-based knowledge meets a true understanding of one’s personal desires and lifestyle needs.