The Feminist Argument Against Hormonal Birth Control

You either believe women have the agency to make good decisions or you're the Washington Post.

Hopefully this free offering will nudge you to shell out $5 to support our world domination scheme.

Read this recent Washington Post piece if you want to feel your blood pressure go up.

Here is a similarly condescending piece that ran in the New York Times¹ about how doctors should be up front with women the potential side effects of hormonal birth control otherwise *lowers voice* they will turn to other women on the internet, women without MEDICAL DEGREES!

NYT parenting columnist

Both pieces put the blame on Tik-Tok influencers for encouraging women to get off birth control because of potential damage that could be done to their bodies and instead opt for tracking their ovulation. What’s worse, is that right-wing pundits also think women getting off birth control is a good idea— and that is the real crime. I’m convinced that if leftist women and/or women of color, we’re making an argument against hormonal birth control—by saying things like WE DON’T WANT OUR BODIES COLONIZED BY MERCK—that outlets like NYT and WaPo would cover ‘the discourse’ in a very different way, or more likely, just not at all.

There’s no real curiosity as to why a digitally savvy and sex-educated women would not trust their doctors and instead trust other women. Instead the women in these stories are portrayed as being exploited by the Big Bad Algorithm while right wing zealots cheer from atop a shuttered Planned Parenthood clinic.

Wellness Momfluencers Are Not the Problem

You know what they used to call women who didn’t want a bunch of synthetics chemicals mass produced by corporate conglomerates? Hippies! Now they’re hand maidens to the alt-right.

Hippie or MAGA ??

I’m not a medical professional, I’m a just woman (she/hers/lololol jk) with what I’d classify as second wave feminist values. I understand the political and cultural significance of the pill. But after fifty years, I think it deserves some scrutiny in its current context. What does it mean, then, in the 21st century, that we encourage women do rely on regime of synthetic hormones than to trust that they can track their own ovulation. As my tribe is known to say, this is progress? Birth control, like abortion, divorce, battered women shelters, and bank loans can be tools of female liberation but that doesn’t mean that their widespread use is necessarily a marker of progress.

Can the Trad Wife and Lefty Mom be Friends?

I belong to the first generation of women who were put on birth control during puberty. I was on (and occasionally off) birth control for two decades and so was almost every other woman I know. Which means I grew up surrounded by women who talked about the terrible effects birth control had on their mood and bodies. And frankly, I sort of dismissed them because *I* never had any real problems until I tried to get pregnant. After suppressing ovulation with birth control for years at a time, I was no longer consistently ovulating! Strange?? I asked my OBGYN, do you think this has something to do with me being on birth control for 20 years?

Nope!

The medical consensus is that hormonal birth control does not have any longterm downside. I find this hard to believe, especially since my cohort of women are the first to take the pill “long term” and our experiences have yet to be quantified, in fact, they keep being dismissed.

Women my age enter their childbearing years around 2004 but realistically closer to 2012

As long as women who embrace ‘liberal values’ stay silent because they’re terrified to hold any opinion that overlaps with ‘right-wing commenters’ then ding-dongs like Ben Shapiro will continue to be the loudest voice in a conversation about OVULATION.

Ok, so, let me give you a ‘feminist’² reframe.

The Feminist Argument to Get Off Birth Control (FROM A WOMAN COLORRRRRR🇨🇱)

*True female liberation is liberation from political and corporate forces that try to divorce you from your own body. Your body is wise and it is powerful. You already posses the power to avoid pregnancy without the help of a pharmaceutical company.

*Do you want to engage in a decades long relationship with synthetic hormones and for-profit corporations like Merck and Pfizer? Or do you want to engage in a decades long relationship with your own body?

*You are a resourceful and intelligent woman who is capable of using a calendar (or an app) to know when the roughly 4 days of every month you’re fertile. You are capable of making decisions about your sex life during that time. Do not let a male dominated institution pathologize your body and infantilize your mind.

*If women were the sole group to come up with innovations for family planning— is this what they would come with? Mass produced synthetic hormones that suppress ovulation and create profit for shareholders? There have been no scientific advancements in birth control since the 1980s because pharmaceutical companies don’t think there’s enough profit-incentive to innovate (due to stringent FDA guidelines, potential for new litigation and so on). The patch, the ring, the shot are all different delivery systems of the same hormone regime. Instead, the only investment pharmaceutical companies into contraception is marketing. Drug companies have rebranded birth control as ‘lifestyle drug,’ meaning, a drug prescribed healthy people that can improve minor maladies (acne, weight gain, painful periods, etc). Over the years there’s only been slight changes in hormone doses based on the increased rates of uterine or breast cancer. This lack of innovation and focus on marketing is strategy to minimize risk and maximize profit. Women deserve better.

*What if, instead of relying of regime of synthetic hormones and prescription renewal, you harnessed the accrued knowledge of how a woman’s menstrual cycle works and passed that knowledge down to your daughter? Shared it with other women? What if you entrusted your fertility to a community of women instead of to male medical professionals who will never ovulate?

*Further, do not let the Washington Post call an entire generation of women were born with a smartphone in their hands ‘digitally illiterate’. And do not let the irony pass you by: this is a newspaper whose pompous motto is ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness’ that is advocating censorship of Tik-Tok accounts that are anti hormonal birth control.

*There are known risks to using birth control that include heart attack, stroke, blood clots, and liver tumors. There are no health risks to tracking your ovulation.

*If you believe teenage girls are responsible enough to take the right pill everyday for decades on end, then you must also believe they are responsible enough to learn how their cycle works.

*“Not all women …” can track their cycle, risk an unplanned pregnancy, want to be unsure if they’re protected against pregnancy, fill in the blank. But what about you? Are you a woman who can?

“Some women need hormonal birth control because…” they are with abusive partners, they want to treat a secondary issue, they don’t have regular periods, they live in an impoverished country where women have little control over their reproductive life. Does that situation apply to all FORTY SIX MILLION WOMEN between ages 15-59 that are on hormonal birth control in the United States?

*The cause of women’s liberation can not rely on the goodwill of drug companies, the medical industrial complex, for-profit corporations, or politicians. Women’s power always resides in themselves and in other women. Women’s autonomy will not be granted by men, doctors, or experts; it must be seized.

1. “Every day, the New York Times carries a motto in a box on its front page. ‘All the News That's Fit to Print,’ it says. It's been saying it for decades, day in and day out. I imagine most readers of the canonical sheet have long ceased to notice this bannered and flaunted symbol of its mental furniture. I myself check every day to make sure that the bright, smug, pompous, idiotic claim is still there. Then I check to make sure that it still irritates me. If I can still exclaim, under my breath, why do they insult me and what do they take me for and what the hell is it supposed to mean unless it's as obviously complacent and conceited and censorious as it seems to be, then at least I know I still have a pulse. You may wish to choose a more rigorous mental workout but I credit this daily infusion of annoyance with extending my lifespan.” - Christopher Hitchens

2. People have all different and kooky definitions of feminism these days but I’m a strict second waver. I believe that women and men should have equal rights in civil society but I also think they different. Sex negative.