When We Complain About Birth Control
Believe it or not, this isn’t about women vs. men.
With the recent news that the male birth control shot study was discontinued, it sparked some anger between people on all sides of the issue. But when everyone is griping at everyone else, we’re losing sight of some of the real concerns.
Women who have complained about the study being ended because of the adverse events aren’t complaining because they want men to suffer. The complaints are because hormonal birth control for women has been approved by the FDA and other agencies before studies showed that it actually increased a risk of illness/harm. For example, Yaz. Women weren’t told that drugs with drospirenone (Yaz) had between a 1.5- to 3-fold greater risk of blood clots than users of levonorgestrel (Plan B) until 2009 and 2011. Yaz was approved by the FDA in 2006 to prevent pregnancy. Though blood clots only occur in 9–10 out of 10,000 women taking birth control (compared to 0.5–3 out of 10,000 who don’t), it still means that women who might have been at higher risk for blood clots were unknowingly subjected to a drug that actually harmed them or could have harmed them.
Women who have complained about the study mentioning the increase in depression and suicidal thoughts are upset because they have been told by doctors, nurses, drug companies, pharmacists, etc. that their depression had nothing to do with their contraceptive medication. In fact, even when you look up the issue, studies fail to address whether there is a causal link or not between mental health issues and contraception. In fifty-six years, researchers can only say that women who take birth control seem to also have higher rates of antidepressant use and it took researchers until 2016 to even admit that much. But in less than four years of a male birth control study, using some of the same hormones, they have established that depression can be caused by birth control.
When you are being given the same kind of medication as another group of people, but more scrutiny seems to be given to the risks to them as opposed to the risks that people like you faced, then of course you’re going to be pissed. But the people who have been angry over this haven’t been angry at the participants or at men in general. It’s the medical profession that is angering them.
For me personally? I’m angry at the gynecologist I had when I was a teenager. She put me on Ortho Tri-Cyclen and it wasn’t long before I wanted to kill myself. I told her that it was making me more severely depressed. She said I was making that up, that my emotions were out of whack because I was a teenager and because I had a history of depression. I found a new gynecologist, and he said I should go off of the Ortho. The most amazing thing occurred when I discontinued it: the depression got better. I knew it was caused by that specific form of birth control because it didn’t happen on the previous drug I’d been on, and it didn’t occur on any other hormonal birth control I tried afterward.
My mom had a worsening of depression when she took birth control. I have known dozens of women who have had that problem. And they’ve had one other issue: a doctor never believed them. So, yeah, they’re angry about not having been listened to by their doctors. They’re angry that they weren’t taken seriously and that’s understandable.
It’s not that anyone is wishing harm upon men. If that birth control shot is too dangerous for men to take it, then I don’t want them to take it. I don’t want to put them in danger, but I also want my medication to face the same kind of scrutiny. And I don’t want hormonal birth control for women to be taken off the market unless the risk is high enough to justify it. I understand that some medicines are safer for some individuals than others. That’s the same message I’ve seen from women who are upset over the study’s results. We just want everyone to have access to safe medication.
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