The Washington Post and TikTok are under fire over apparent attempts to discredit stories women have been sharing about the negative effects of hormonal birth control on their physical and mental health.
The Post reported Thursday that “women are getting off birth control amid [a] misinformation explosion,” referring to the onslaught of viral videos of young women in their teens and 20s discussing how dramatically their lives have improved since getting off hormonal birth control and using natural fertility awareness methods.
“For more and more Gen Z women, there’s an intuitive sense that hormonal birth control might be messing with us, and our brains,” one young woman wrote for The New York Post. “And research is backing it up, showing correlations between the pill and a decreased sex drive, as well as higher rates of depression and suicide, and even stress reactions similar to [post-traumatic stress disorder] survivors.”
“Many of my friends are independently doing the same, whether it’s driven by concern for their mental health, desire for something more natural—or curiosity about what the world looks like when you’re not in a hormonal fog,” she added.
Written by Lauren Weber and Sabrina Malhi, The Washington Post article boasts that “TikTok recently removed at least five videos linking birth control to mental health issues and other health problems after The Post asked how the company prevents the spread of misinformation.”
One of those videos was from The Daily Wire’s Brett Cooper, who argued that birth control can have an effect on who women are attracted to, as well as affect their weight gain and their fertility. That video “racked up over 219,000 ‘likes’ before TikTok removed it following The Post’s inquiry,” the newspaper noted.
TikTok did not immediately explain to The Daily Signal whether it vetted Weber and Malhi’s claims of misinformation before it removed the videos. Weber and Malhi did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Alex Clark, host of The Spillover podcast, who has drawn fire for her outspokenness on the harms of birth control, called The Washington Post piece “dishonest reporting” that suggests only conservatives are against hormonal birth control.
“Women of all political backgrounds have been screaming from the rooftops that [hormonal birth control] has led to a litany of health issues all the way back to the ’70s,” Clark explained to The Daily Signal. “Teenage girls are prescribed birth control like candy. No in-depth conversation is had about side effects, and now those teenage girls have grown up, have differing political views, and are dealing with the physical consequences of HBC.”
Clark maintains that birth control is pushed upon women by the pharmaceutical industry as a huge moneymaker.
“Big Pharma is doing everything they can to squash this conversation, because women are their biggest cash cow,” she said. “Get us on birth control as teens. Recommend antidepressants for the side effects. Birth control works as a band-aid covering up warning signs of deeper hormonal or fertility issues.”
“When we’re ready to have a family, we find out,” she added. “Now, we need to pay [$20,000] for fertility treatments. Birth control is the gateway prescription drug to a lifetime of being Big Pharma-reliant. If they lose the next generation of young women on birth control, they worry they won’t have us hooked for life. It was never about women. It was always about our money.”
Emma Waters, a senior research associate in the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at The Heritage Foundation, also pointed out to The Daily Signal that current resistance to birth control has little to do with religion or politics. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
“For years now, women have been sounding the alarm about the harms of hormonal birth control,” Waters said. “In many cases, it has little to do with religious or ideological belief. Women are tired of a ‘one-sized-fits-all’ approach to health care that actively harms them. Gen Z women have had enough.”
The viral accounts and videos about birth control and its effects show Gen Z “rebelling against the hyper-medicalized approach to dealing with any issue, from acne to painful or inconsistent hormonal cycles,” Waters said.
And the researcher suggested that those defending birth control may be more out of touch than they realize.
“Frankly, The Washington Post piece really showed its age as older millennials lectured and dismissed the very real women whose own stories about the harms of hormonal birth control are driving this movement to make women, not Big Pharma, the driver in women’s reproductive health,” she added.
Lila Rose, the founder of the pro-life organization Live Action, called TikTok’s censorship of Cooper’s video “insane and ridiculous,” adding that the “harms of birth control are well-documented, and the fact that TikTok is deleting content criticizing birth control should concern everyone.”
“To be anti-fertility is to be anti-woman,” Rose told The Washington Post, “and the proliferation of hormonal birth control is just another way of trying to force women to be more like men, with significant consequences for our emotional and physical health.”
And Brittany Martinez, the founder of Evie magazine, told The Washington Post’s Weber that she should be ashamed of “contributing to the mass gaslighting and dismissing of women’s horrible experiences on birth control.”
“I’d say you are out of touch and uninformed at best, but you’re also directly complicit in TikTok censoring and removing viral videos of women speaking out,” she added.
Research psychologist Sarah Hill, who went off the pill herself and experienced positive health effects, told The New York Post earlier this year that after going off the pill, “I had a lot more energy, and I was exercising and cooking again. Suddenly, I was interested in sex.”
She credits the pandemic with helping young women take a serious look at their health.
“The pandemic allowed us to focus attention on our health,” Hill told The New York Post. “For women who were not in relationships and weren’t sexually active, it was an opportunity to break up with their birth control … . They wanted to find out how they would think and feel and experience the world without it.”
“This generation of women is demanding they get information about what’s going into their body,” Hill added. “A younger generation of women are saying, ‘Hey, wait a minute. You can’t just tell me what to put in my body and expect me to blindly obey.’”
Dr. Taraneh Shirazian, a gynecologist at NYU Langone Health, similarly told the publication that she sees a “generational shift” in attitudes toward birth control.
“I have noticed that many patients prefer non-hormonal birth control,” she explained. “Many are keen on limiting their body’s exposure to outside hormones so that they can feel more natural and like themselves.”