Birth control in the US right now is full of contradictions.

Access to contraceptives has never been easier. Many states have passed legislation to allow pharmacists to prescribe and dispense hormonal contraceptives directly to individuals, instead of requiring a doctor’s prescription first. Telehealth services have helped make it easier to find different contraceptive methods in more rural parts of the country. The first over-the-counter birth control pill, Opill, hit pharmacy shelves in early 2024.

Yet birth control is also facing cultural backlash. Social media platforms are awash with testimonials from people tossing aside their contraceptives in fear and sometimes anger, saying hormones are affecting their bodies or changing their personalities. Meanwhile, influencers are spreading misinformation about hormonal birth control, like that birth control causes long-term hormone disruption or causes cancer.

It’s a weird time to talk about birth control. But understanding the current cultural moment requires more than just agreeing that birth control is good and that those who decry it are wrong.

Rather, it’s worth interrogating where people’s dissatisfactions come from, and tracing how legitimate experiences with and worries about hormonal contraceptives can lead people toward alternate (and often scientifically dubious) sources of education about their bodies.

A history of harm

This backlash against birth control is partially related to growing conversations around neglected issues in women’s health. In the past 10 years, for example, doctors have finally started to take IUD insertion pain seriously. There’s now wider recognition of how distressing symptoms of perimenopause and menopause can be, and conditions like endometriosis are finally getting the research it deserves.

Historically, “women and gender minorities are a medically underserved and medically mistreated population,” says Kate Clancy, a human reproductive ecologist and anthropologist at the University of Illinois, and the author of Period: The Real Story of Menstruation.

Many people with uteruses either have had or know someone who has had horrible experiences with health care that has diminished their trust in medicine, she says — so it makes sense that when people consider hormonal contraception and the possibility of side effects they start to question, “Is this really good for me?”

Racist and classist prejudices also shaped how doctors counseled people on birth control methods over the past 20 years. In the late 2000s, after the first hormonal IUD, Mirena, and the first hormonal implant, Implanon (which later became Nexplanon) were approved for use in the US. At that time, “the family planning community became very enamored with the high levels of effectiveness of those methods,” says Christine Dehlendorf, director of the Person-Centered Reproductive Health Program at the........

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