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Journalism of Courage
By Emma Goldberg
Ashley Hamrick’s doctor was trying to get to the bottom of something: Why, exactly, did Hamrick want to get off birth control? “Are you feeling any side effects?”
No, that wasn’t it. Hamrick, who was 26 at the time, felt normal. No unusual weight gain, no mood swings. But a couple of questions had wormed their way into her mind and lodged themselves there: Who am I without birth control? Will I feel some sort of difference coming off it?
Hamrick had started taking birth control pills a decade earlier, when she was 15. Now, as she browsed her social media feeds, she kept stumbling on videos of women saying how much better they felt when they stopped taking the pills, content she wasn’t seeking out. The posts typically went like this: a glowing blonde in a workout top — the picture of health! — saying that she had stopped taking birth control pills and immediately felt more clarity of mind. Like an emotional fog had lifted, like she was a brand-new, much happier person.
Hamrick’s doctor was clear with her. If she wasn’t experiencing any side effects, there was no reason to stop taking birth control. Hamrick wasn’t so sure. The more videos about the pill she watched, the more skeptical she became, and the more she felt drawn toward experimenting. She was, after all, in a moment of change. She had moved, on a whim, from Indiana to Texas. Soon after settling near Houston she met a guy and they started dating, then looking at engagement rings.
Just over a year since Hamrick decided to stop taking the pills, she has figured out who she is without birth control: She is a mother. Her baby is 4 months old.
Three years since the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson, birth control has also become a more contested terrain, politically but also socially and culturally.
On YouTube, podcast hosts with followings in the millions rail against hormonal contraceptives, alarming doctors around the country who are now hearing their patients repeat these sentiments.
Alex Clark, the popular Turning Point USA podcaster, has suggested that the way women are prescribed birth control is indirectly linked to “major fertility issues” (because of the underlying health issues it might mask), or that birth control can change who women are attracted to (“*whispers* the birth control pill can falsely make women feel bisexual,” Clark posted on the social platform X), which doctors say is untrue. In an appearance on Joe Rogan’s show, Calley Means, now an adviser to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said that the medical industry views birth control as “recurring revenue”: “Oh interesting,” Means said with a conspiratorial lilt. “You can actually convince someone to take a pill for years, for almost most of their life.”
Go to TikTok and look up the words “birth control” and a stream of videos appears showing women venting about the pill. There are videos of women saying that birth control pills lead to infertility. There are also videos of women discussing its real potential side effects: water weight gain, depression, loss of libido, irregular bleeding, all of which can be true for some people.
Earlier this year, a study by public health researchers at La Trobe University found that among the top 100 TikTok videos about reproductive health, just 10% were from medical professionals, and about 50% of creators made comments rejecting hormonal contraception. The top 100 most popular posts on TikTok about birth control had amassed some 5 billion views.
In more than a dozen interviews with young women of different political leanings across the country, many said these TikTok videos and podcast clips were making them feel at turns curious and anxious, wondering whether to trust their doctors or the influencers promising greener, healthier pastures far from conventional medical guidance about contraceptives.
“We are not given full informed consent when it comes to the pill,” said Clark, host of the conservative wellness podcast “Culture Apothecary,” in an interview with The New York Times. Clark began taking hormonal birth control as a teenager and stopped in 2018, eventually switching to tracking her menstrual cycle on her phone. She said she has used the apps Flo and 28, the last of which was founded by the creators of the conservative Evie Magazine and backed by right-wing kingmaker Peter Thiel. Both are part of a fast-growing, multibillion-dollar market for women’s health technology.
But the deluge of podcasts and social media posts criticizing birth control — and not just on the right — has many concerned about the mounting legal and political efforts to block access to oral contraceptives.
This spring, more than a dozen public health organizations sued the Trump administration, arguing that it had undercut access to health services including birth control by withholding Title X funds. Looming Medicaid cuts, which would leave millions of Americans without health coverage, also threaten to limit access to contraceptives.
Until recently, it hadn’t seemed like this moment — with influencers promising bliss and mental clarity post-birth control — was leading to any change in how women in the United States were using it. But last month, Trilliant Health, a health care analytics company, conducted an analysis for the Times and found a decrease in the use of hormonal birth control pills among some women ages 18 to 44. In 2019, 13.1% of women said they used the pill; in 2024, that number fell to 10.2%.
Scholars worry that the legal efforts to restrict access to birth control will be buoyed by the podcasts and social media posts criticizing it. “If we look at what happened between Roe v. Wade and Dobbs, we see a steady escalation of the stigmatization of abortions, and a steady escalation of legal restrictions on the provision of abortion care,” said Amanda Stevenson, a sociologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
“Those two processes, stigmatization and legal restrictions,” she added, “are mutually reinforcing.”
At the same time, the messaging on social media is resonating with women who feel as if they have been brushed off by their doctors when raising valid worries. Nearly a quarter of women between 15 and 49 either take hormonal pills or have an IUD, and many are prescribed birth control before they’re sexually active, to help with managing their periods, acne or symptoms of endometriosis.
“They kind of want to throw birth control on people and not listen to every individual’s concern,” said Jaden Moretti-Leipf, 23, who works as a dog trainer in Rhode Island and earlier this year stopped using hormonal birth control. “I think they cover it up and say take this, and that’s the end of it.”
Doctors are struggling to figure out what to tell patients who are arriving in their exam rooms consumed by new doubts. Dr. Kimberly Warner, a gynecologist at Kaiser Permanente in Denver, tells them there is no one-size-fits-all approach, that she wants to to help them find a form of contraception that is right for them, whether that is hormonal pills, condoms or something else.
Dr. Jennifer Peña, chief medical officer for the reproductive telehealth platform Wisp, says she sees dozens of patients a year who come to her with worries often rooted in misinformation.
She traces many of these sentiments to wellness influencers. “There’s a cry for identity,” Peña said. “Social media is becoming the algorithm for education, and once there’s a trend it becomes the norm for topics of conversation inside clinics.”
These conversations on social media are jarring for some people who had a hard time getting contraceptives in the first place, which is how Angel Mayfield, 21, feels. Mayfield is a student at the historically Black Florida A&M University. She grew up in a Christian household and started taking birth control pills as a high school sophomore after getting a prescription and ordering them online from Planned Parenthood. It was $50 monthly and she paid for it herself, using the money she made working at Walmart. “I didn’t even tell my mom,” Mayfield recalled. “But she eventually ended up finding out.”
Now Mayfield is disturbed to hear from friends who seem to think birth control is not worth the side effects. Every few weeks last spring, Mayfield set up a table in the center of her college campus and handed out packages of birth control pills and emergency contraceptives.
“The biggest thing I see on social media is this earthy, green-girl lifestyle-type shebang,” Mayfield said. “It’s like a trendy aesthetic.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
