It may surprise many people that there is a a concerted effort going on quite literally under their noses—on the screens of their smartphones, tablets, and laptops—to sow distrust, uncertainty, and fear of ordinary birth control among this country’s young people and particularly, young women.
In most instances the folks responsible for fostering this distrust are the same people vehemently opposed to abortion. Their failure to see any dissonance in advocating such contradictory positions might be perplexing—if you didn’t take their motivation into account. It’s the natural fulfillment of what they would consider an ideal society: one where men are in control, and women know their place.
This wouldn’t be a big problem if they and their ilk kept that vision to themselves. But that is not how the right wing operates in the era of social media. They love to assume the role of righteous crusaders for a moral imperative that allows them to feel in control in a confusing world that discomfits them with its varieties of human experience. Many of the purveyors of the disinformation blitz currently underway on social media about the supposed dangers of routine birth control are men, but not all of them. Some of them are simply opportunistic, looking for clicks and attention. Some of them have a political ax to grind.
But some of them appear to be acting out of sheer malice. Emboldened by the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, they’ve now trained their focus on hormonal birth control, hysterically amplifying its alleged “hazards” to create a narrative of uncertainty ripe for what they see as the conservative-dominated highest court’s next logical step.
As reported by Lauren Weber and Sabrina Malhi for The Washington Post:
Search for “birth control” on TikTok or Instagram and a cascade of misleading videos vilifying hormonal contraception appear: Young women blaming their weight gain on the pill. Right-wing commentators claiming that some birth control can lead to infertility. Testimonials complaining of depression and anxiety.
[…]
Physicians say they’re seeing an explosion of birth-control misinformation online targeting a vulnerable demographic: people in their teens and early 20s who are more likely to believe what they see on their phones because of algorithms that feed them a stream of videos reinforcing messages often divorced from scientific evidence.
The Food and Drug Administration approved the use oral birth control in 1960. Since then, it has been used safely and effectively by literally hundreds of millions to prevent conception. The effects of its widespread use have quite literally transformed human society for the better. As explained by Planned Parenthood:
In the five decades since these events, profound and beneficial social changes occurred, in large part because of women’s relatively new freedom to effectively control their fertility — maternal and infant health have improved dramatically, the infant death rate has plummeted, and women have been able to fulfill increasingly diverse educational, political, professional, and social aspirations.
As one might expect for a medicine that has been used by over 500 million women alive today, the overall safety of “the pill” has been well-established for decades. The first over-the-counter
distribution of hormonal oral contraceptives is scheduled to begin late this month or in early April, enabling access without a prescription.
But despite its overwhelming acceptance by the medical community, oral contraception has been newly targeted by so-called “influencers” online. Their efforts are having an impact: Doctors, including one interviewed for Weber and Malhi’s article, report seeing patients forced to travel outside of their anti-abortion states to terminate unwanted pregnancies resulting from misinformation they’ve heard about the pill on social media sites. Some of this misinformation is generated by medically illiterate “health coaches” who appear primarily motivated by the huge number of clicks they generate, while some of it—such as the Peter Thiel-funded right-wing women’s magazine “Evie”—is plainly ideological in origin.
As Weber and Malhi report:
Brett Cooper, a media commentator for the conservative Daily Wire, argued in a viral TikTok clip that birth control can impact fertility, cause women to gain weight and even alter whom they are attracted to. It racked up over 219,000 “likes” before TikTok removed it following The Post’s inquiry.
In a Daily Wire video, Cooper and political commentator Candace Owens denounce birth-control pills and IUDs as “unnatural,” with Owens saying she’s a “big advocate of getting women to realize this stuff is not normal,” and claiming that viewers of her content told her copper IUDs can harm women’s fertility. Medical experts say there is no evidence birth control impacts fertility long term.
The authors note that women of color may be particularly vulnerable to these efforts to foster distrust of birth control, given the medical industry’s history of discrimination and bias in dispensing and recommending birth control methods.
Other purveyors of “concern” surrounding the use of oral contraceptives include right-wing “influencers” such as Ben Shapiro and podcaster Matt Walsh. Walsh, writing recently for the right-wing Daily Wire, took specific exception to the Post’s article, suggesting it selectively portrayed the benefits of oral contraception while ignoring what he, in turn, selectively characterized as the pill’s potentially harmful effects. Walsh, for example, focused on a 2018 Danish study that found an increase of attempted suicide associated with hormonal contraception. What he ignores are the limitations in that study, as described here:
Limitations included a lack of information with regards to the risk factors that may well be influential in the relationship between hormonal contraception and suicidal behaviour. These include important social factors, such as relationship break-down/status, exposure to domestic abuse, and strong family history of mental health diagnoses.
The problem is not, as Walsh charges, the censoring of information. There are plenty of scientific reports about hormonal birth control, just as there are for other drugs and medications. The problem is peddling inflammatory data to an audience of unsophisticated young people. Yes, there can be side effects to hormonal birth control that may affect a small number of its users. But those effects need to be understood in context.
For example, while a tiny number of birth control users may experience blood clots, the risk for blood clots is actually greater for those who are pregnant. And while hormone-based birth control can also show a slight elevation in breast cancer risk (as does the long term use of aspirin or ibuprofen), the risk for other types of cancer—such as ovarian, endometrial and colorectal—is actually decreased.
One might believe that Walsh was actually concerned about women’s’ health. But his article expresses his actual motives quite plainly: He views women’s subservience to men as a desired state of affairs, and he thinks denying birth control will help that goal along.
From his own Daily Wire article:
With fewer women on the pill, more women will become mothers, and some of them will drop out of the workforce and discover fulfillment and happiness as wives and homemakers. This is the real crisis that the Washington Post and the other Left wing rags are worried about. The last thing that the elites want to see is a movement of women fully embracing their own womanhood, and men fully embracing their manhood.
There’s certainly a lot of hallucinatory thinking to unpack there. But in addition to the real harm caused by this tiny minority reinforcing its agenda on social media, it is the nexus between the current Supreme Court’s controlling conservative majority, the anti-abortion lobby, and the behavior of Republican-dominated state legislatures that poses a far greater threat to continued access to birth control. Justice Clarence Thomas has openly called for the reversal of the court’s prior rulings (the cases of Griswold, which allowed married and unmarried couples to obtain contraception, and Eisenstadt, which extended that right to unmarred couples). The Griswold decision in particular formed the legal underpinning for Roe v. Wade. Now that Roe is gone, it is certainly possible that the court will consider overruling Griswold as well, permitting states to ban contraception as they see fit.
Weber and Malhi note how that the spigot of misinformation from social media influencers as well as language in state statutes conflating contraception with abortion helps the forced-birth lobby implement legislation restricting the availability of birth control. They point to state efforts restricting the availability of contraception on college campuses and through state-run Medicaid programs, efforts which deliberately blur the distinction between birth control and abortion.
But their thorough analysis doesn’t quite capture the element of perverse misogyny at work in this crusade to demonize something that has proved effective—and transformative of women’s role in our society—for over 70 years. The very people who brought about Dobbs and eliminated many women’s option to terminate unwanted pregnancies are the same people who are now targeting contraception. Their end goal is to control female sexual behavior so that pregnancy cannot be prevented (except by complete abstinence). Should anyone actually become pregnant, the goal is to provide no recourse, under any circumstances. In reality that’s not a plan at all, but a punishment.
This is what Walsh and others really mean by “women fully embracing their own womanhood.” It’s what ultimately underlies the right’s unrelenting obsession with women’s bodies and what they do with them. It envisions turning back the clock on all women’s progress over the past century and instead reimposing a regime where every person’s potential is irreversibly tied to their sex or gender, with men running things and women in a subservient, childbearing role.
In other words: They don’t really care about women’s health. They just want their patriarchy back.