Sunday, February 6, 2022

Should We Be Worried About Hormones in Birth Control?

You know those bridesmaid-font t-shirts and mugs with sassy slogans like, "Powered by coffee and wine?" If I were a slogan-merch person, I'd add one item to that list: Mirena. As a person with naturally hellish periods, I am so grateful for my hormone-releasing IUD—and the nearly-nonexistent menstruation that comes with it—that I shudder to think what my life would look like without it. Me and hormonal contraception: It's love.

In the background of my love affair, though, has been an unsettling feeling that maybe it's all too good to be true. I keep hearing about people quitting hormonal birth control and wondering: Wait, should I be worried?

After a little digging, I realized I'm kind of lucky: Hormonal contraception has been causing unpleasant side effects for some users literally since it was invented. The earliest trials for birth control pills in the 1950s had large numbers of test subjects (mostly poor Puerto Rican women who, by the way, weren't even told what they were taking) drop out because the side effects were so intolerable—so researchers began testing on women they could force to participate, such as residents of a Massachusetts mental asylum and medical students, also in Puerto Rico (sense a theme?), who were told they'd be expelled if they didn't. The amount of hormones in oral contraception has been significantly reduced since those early versions, but for a minority of users, unpleasant side effects like unwanted weight gain or loss, pelvic pain, yeast infections, or bloating still abound. It's not just oral BC: Though it's less common, some users of hormonal IUDs, implants, and other long-acting hormonal methods also experience side effects they don't love.

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