Unintended consequences of birth control

[FeministBadger]

This week I've had another frustrating discussion with a doctor trying to push LARCs on me and I ended up lying about planning on conceiving to get them to drop it.

Dwelling on it over the weekend, I've realised that while birth control has been a fantastic freedom for women it's come with a lot of consequences including an expectation that women should just put up with 30+ years of not so minor side effects to control their fertility.

I feel like there's a feminist explanation in here somewhere - it's almost like a backlash of "You want to be able control your fertility? Fine but you're now the only one responsible for if you get pregnant, you ought to be sexually available at all times, and don't complain about any side effects just consider yourself lucky"

Can someone a bit more feminist-y articulate what I'm saying?

I think I know what you mean. I feel like it’s an extension of the attitude that women just have to put up with horrendous period related problems, menopause, endometriosis, birth injuries, prolapse, and on and on - all women’s health issues, just put up with it because nobody is very interested in women’s medical complaints. I feel like I’ve worded that badly!

Anyway, I’m currently on a million painkillers and have been in pain since I was 20 weeks pregnant, which was in November 2016. This ongoing shitfest has only just become of interest to the 11th doctor I’ve seen because I have been unerringly persistent about getting things sorted. I had one knobhead of a registrar tell me that it was totally normal to feel “mild discomfort” for up to a few years after giving birth. As I’m on similar meds to a palliative care patient I think we might be a bit beyond “mild discomfort”. It’s a very shitty attitude that women should put up and shut up with pain which comes from women’s health problems.

I feel like I’ve written a load of unintelligible nonsense there but hope you get the gist of it, also hoping someone more coherent comes along and fixes this for us!

No sorry but I just wanted to say I feel what your saying. Hopefully someone more feminst-y will be along soon with the magic description for it.

What would you prefer? No contraception?

Personally in my younger days when I was not in a relationship I saw no problem at all in taking on the responsibility of contraception. My life and I controlled it.

In the context of a settled relationship this is a matter for you and your partner to discuss.

I totally understand what you're saying. The sooner they sort out the male contraceptive pill the better! I've been shocked to read how many women have had real problems trying to get medical professionals to take things like coils and implants out of their bodies promptly when suffering horrendous side effects. Completely unacceptable and reading about those horror stories put me right off even giving anything like that a go!

No, totally with you on this one OP. Back in the day, I found I didn't get on with hormonal contraception - major depression. Then, asking round my friends it became apparent that most of them suffered to one degree or another - from bad depression to "just a bit more weepy and emotional than I would be, but you just put up with it and get on with it..." It struck me that it was a kind of double whammy - as you say, OP, "well, you wanted control of your fertility and there's no such thing as a free lunch", but over and above that, a kind of "well, women are weepy and emotional and unstable anyway, so what does it matter if the pill makes them a bit worse?"

(As a side issue, I've also thought that a hell of a lot of women's "mental illness" is actually a perfectly rational reaction to societally imposed powerlessness and some of the men in their lives being shitty to them.)

I think you said it yourself.

Many women who were young when the pill came out and who wanted sexual freedom complained that they were then expected to be freely sexually available to men.

It is generally left to women to be in control of fertility and don't get me started on side effects.

BUT better than not having it. Control over fertility is vital.

Female sexuality, fertility and reproduction is work. Whether it's what we should look like or the pain we go through to have or not have children.

I suppose it is good that there are so many types of contraception around though?

I know exactly what you mean about birth control being pushed on the woman though - after all three of my children were born, the midwife, HV and GP all suggested getting a coil fitted - gave me leaflets, offered to book me in. No, I said, we use condoms. They all gave me funny looks! Perhaps they feel sorry for my poor husband 😉

I think there is truth in what you say ‘ the ‘well, you can’t have everything - you’ll have migraines or you’ll get knocked up, which would you rather?’ type attitude.

archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/05/09/specials/greer-fertility.html?scp=10&sq=family%2520planning&st=cse

Germaine Greer - Sex and Destiny - The Politics of Human Fertility.

This gave me the best contraception advice ever and I followed it for life after reading this. She questions taking 24 hour/365 day contraception, when there are about 5 days of fertility and x number of times you have sex on those dates? So 365 days contraception for what, 24 times a year? She talks about natural methods and I learned about this from her. I was successfully not pregnant until the month I tried for son number one on the right day and fell pregnant first time, same again with second child.

Give it a read, history lesson too.

Fortunately I'm in a relationship where we take joint responsibility for contraception so for me it's not a personal issue, however I know there are many women who are not so fortunate.

And clearly there are many positives but as PPs have pointed out there are also a heck of a lot of side effects which many doctors a habit of dismissing or minimising. I had three coils which dislodged with the last one literally getting stuck in the wall of my cervix and yet despite knowing this history my doctor tried to push it on me yet again "if you're really against hormonal contraceptives".

Me stating it doesn't work for me isn't enough, me stating that my husband and I use condoms isn't trusted, the medical profession doesn't trust me to make my own decisions unless I push to.

I get really annoyed about the gaslfighting that goes on with LARCS. Lost count of the number of GPs who have told me it would be "very unlikely" contraception was making me feel ill. Fuck off. Studies show they have a negative impact on women.
My DD will be thinking about this soon and I don't know what advice to give. Especially because the pill damages libido.

I was always very that they stopped trials of the male contraceptive pill due to all the side effects - same sort of ones that females are expected to put up with without complaining...

(If anybody has a good link to a decent reference on that I would be interested as I've read articles and mn posts that mentiin this but never the source info!)

Oh yes, the damage to one's libido. In the midst of my depression I did get a certain black humour from thinking "the only reason the pill is so sodding effective is that you don't actually want to have sex while you're taking it..."

And yes to the coil, Badger - I remember one of my student housemates collapsing in her lab haemorrhaging when her coil shifted. She had it taken out and afterwards remarked "not so much a method of contraception as a method of slow, painful sterilisation."

I spent most of my reproductive years using condoms - very successfully, no accidental pregnancies (admittedly supplemented with a couple of occasions on which I took the MAP when one failed - but at least with the condom, you can see when it's failed. I have quite a few friends who've got pregnant while using the pill as responsibly as one could reasonably be expected to manage, caught out by minor tummy bugs/antibiotics where the doctor forgot to mention that they stopped the pill from working.)

Also YY to Sex and Destiny, fascinating read.

I had a tubal ligation as early as they would allow because of the horrible side effects of BC pills and inter uterine devices.
That was in the 60s when the BC pills were much too strong.
The research they do on women's medicine is substandard and so we end up being test subjects.
I hear you OP and I am so sorry.

Incidentally, I do totally get that contraception is possibly one of the most amazing thing to happen for women... but at the same time, the lack of interest in continuing to develop forms that don't come with massive side effects, and the paternalism of the medical profession (I'm another one whose complaints about side effects were totally dismissed by doctors).

I was on the pill at 16 and when I went to the follow up appointment I said I felt it was making me emotional and the doctor completely dismissed that was anything to do with the pill so I carried on taking it. My depression got quite severe and in my mind I'd completely disconnected my feelings from the pill because, you know the doctor had dismissed it. Eventually my mother, thank god, said she thought it was worth coming off the pill (my mother was not a medic, just older and wiser) and I started feeling better within a few weeks. I was persuaded by another doctor to try another brand a few years later, with exactly the same results, 2 months in I was barely functioning. I've used condoms successfully since.

I've read testimony of women who have spent years and years depressed, all of their 20s, and finally stopped taking the pill and realised that had been the source of their mental health problems. I think it's scandalous. We are pushing potentially very damaging medicine on healthy women and then denying that it is having a negative impact on them. Yes contraceptive is freeing - I would never ever want to have another child - but it is not without difficulty and we need to be honest and research properly it's effects. I would never ever take hormonal contraceptives again, I've never felt it to be a problem, in fact if I'd just stuck to condoms from my teens I'd have been better off.

I'd also agree with HairyBallTheorem about mental health and women more generally. When I did A Level Sociology we studied someone who'd studied women in the 1970s and their extremely high use of valium who had concluded just that - that women's depression was a reasonable response to motherhood/being a housewife in suburbia. I recently spent some time taking anti-depressants and so many women I know told me they were also taking them. I felt like we hadn't really moved on.

Women's healthcare is inadequate. Hopefully the fact that more women than men are now studying medicine will mean that this starts to change and improve. On mental health, I think that society is so damaging to families and that is the problem - capitalism needs to change imo.

I agree 100% with HairyBallTheorem's 20:51 post. Every word is spot on.

Other than a couple of years in my late teens when I tried multiple different forms of the pill I've always used condoms. Male partner doesn't like it? He can bugger off and find someone else to sleep with, then. Funny how condoms suddenly become a perfectly valid option when the choice is presented that way.

The fact that some doctors are actively denying the side effects that are clearly shown via research is appalling.

I get really irritated when the withdrawal method is dismissed as 'not a method of contraception'. Not true. If done properly, it's 96% effective, with typical use, 78% effective.

When I was in a LTR with a trusted partner, it's what we used for years. I weighed the risks against the side effects of the pill, coil, implant, etc and decided it was worth it.

But quite often, women who opt for this method are made to feel as though they're idiots! On the odd occasion that I've chatted to women about it, they've been a bit sheepish about saying it was their preferred method too.

I can't help but think that one of the reasons withdrawal is rubbished as impractical is that it can interfere with the man's enjoyment of sex, both psychologically and physically.

I feel that men expect young women to be in a constant state of sexual readiness, but at the same time neutered.

I remember one time, I was having drinks with a bloke who was angling for a casual hook up. When I informed him I favoured non invasive contraception, he actually looked quite angry, pointing out to me (in case it hadn't occurred to me?) that I might get pregnant!

It's difficult for me to articulate my feelings about this... I'm just so, sick of having stuff stuck inside me for the own good!

Phew...that long...!!

Oops... meant to say:

I'm just so, so sick of having stuff stuck inside me for my own good!'

I think Op is right, I think you could see the seeds of it in the 'sexual revolution' which apparently was the beginning of men thinking women should be sexually available at all times.
A few years ago I was at a seminar about contraception (I am very old, most of the participants were in 20s or 30s) - people had no idea at all of barrier methods, other than condoms. I used these for years and while they weren't perfect, they sure beat everything else, Germaine Greer is right, it makes no sense at all to be permanently medicated for the hadnful of times you might conceive.
I think the lower rates ot teen pg are almost certainly due to the pusing of LARCs, and I wonder what price is being paid.
Years ago (as I said I am very old) there was a brilliant piece in Spare Rib, describing an IPD (intra penile device) which was a kind of umbrella inserted through the urethra which was then opened at the junction of the vas deferens (can't recall exactly) resulting in sperm free ejaculate. Of course it was quite painful to insert and did result in some loss of sexual function, and chronic pain. But this was considered a small price to pay for reliable contraception.
At the bottom of the page, in very small writing, it said 'this is a joke'.

There are just not enough safe contraceptive options, full stop.

Interestingly there have been a couple of Male pills in the pipeline- some of the trials have been halted due to unacceptable side effects. Those side effects are exactly comparable to what women experience but because it’s men.... yeah.

There are very few non hormonal LARCs - really only the copper coil is leave and forget and that can make periods unbearable and has risks during insertion and during use.

There needs to be much more research on a variety of methods for both sexes that are easy to use, and do not cause significant side effects. Yes it’s a feminist issue.

While I accept the advent of the pill was in many ways a step forward, I find the narrative that's grown up around it a bit annoying and patronising - as though women were mindlessly sprogging all over the place until the clever men in lab coats came along to free them from their own bodily functions... When in reality, there's never been a time in which women haven't shared know-how about preventing unwanted pregnancies.

Likewise, it's often assumed that the only reason women in the developing world have large families is ignorance, when there are a host of perfectly rational reasons for them to do so.

Yes to all of this. My children were planned and born while I was in my 30s but I have been tutted at as though I were an irresponsible teen by doctors when I said no to the pill and coil. In fact I even gave the pill a go, trying 3 different brands, but was not believed by a FP doctor when I told her what side effects I had experienced (mainly zero interest in sex). A quick Google tells you that this is far from uncommon as a side effect!

Interestingly I've had much more sensible and sympathetic conversations with nurses about contraception. It was a nurse who suggested the diaphragm and it was only because of my conversation with her that I felt brave enough to insist on it when I saw the FP doctor (who wanted me to get the coil fitted instead).

See, here's what I don't get. Why in the hell would a doctor think it was their place to tell a woman what form of contraception they would prefer her to be on? In what way is this their business? If there's a specific reason she shouldn't use a specific method that's health related, as in it would cause her harm, then sure, point that out. But why are they having conversations in which a woman says "I want a diaphragm" and they say "no, I think you should get the coil"? Why are they pushing particular methods of contraception against the wishes of the patient? Is this a money thing? Surely the coil is more expensive. So why?

The whole way everything related to our reproductive organs is handled in the healthcare system is ridiculous. Doctors talk to women like they're naughty children.

I'm at the point where I just won't see a male gyno, not just because the only times on has given me a smear it's hurt far more than it needs to, but because they just don't fucking listen. If your bedside manner makes your patients want to punch you in the balls then maybe it's time to reconsider how you talk to patients.

Interesting thread. The Pill made me insane: an absolute hormonal wreck. I wouldn’t go back on it if you paid me good money. I’ve got a copper coil now but have been lucky that it’s not made my periods worse, the friends I have who’ve used it have found it has made their periods very heavy.