Some women are beginning to question hormonal contraception, particularly its effects on mood and behavior. annaesilman reports
Photo-Illustration: by Preeti Kinha; Photos: Getty Every day since I was 15 years old, I have taken “the Pill,” a pale-pink tablet containing a combination of levonorgestrel and ethinyl estradiol, two chemicals that trick my body into thinking it’s pregnant so I can’t actually get pregnant.
And yet there’s less conclusive data about the subtler ways the Pill might affect us when it comes to mood or sex drive or overall quality of life, all of which are harder to quantify. Some women who’ve quit the Pill told me they’ve seen a reduction in anxiety or depression; some have seen an increased libido. For others, the effects were more nebulous: I heard phrases like “more alive,” “more clear,” “more myself,” and “like a fog had lifted.
What is the cost to women like me and Regan? Hannah, a 25-year-old Brooklyn-based writer and illustrator, went on the Pill to manage PCOS in her late teens. Soon after, she started fantasizing about walking into traffic. When she brought up her concerns with her doctor, she received a “weird amount” of resistance, so she went off the Pill on her own.
One reason for the dearth of research on the Pill’s mental-health effects is that doing research on women is more complicated and expensive than on men, as a result of the need to take into account participants’ unique hormonal cycles. A 2012 review of the research noted that “surprisingly little” is still known about adverse-mood effects from oral contraceptives. Based on the studies we do have, about 4 to 10 percent of women report deterioration in mood .
In her anti-Pill polemic Sweetening the Pill, soon to be a documentary, writer Holly Grigg-Spall argues that hormonal contraceptives are “tools for a patriarchal society to have a ‘hold’ over women’s bodies.” Suppressing our natural periods makes us more like men, she hypotheses — “docile bodies” less prone to the volatile swings of our “natural” female hormones, and more effective cogs in the patriarchal capitalist machine.
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