Women Ditching The Pill Over Social Media Misinformation

If a young woman searches for “birth control” on TikTok or Instagram, she'll immediately be inundated with misleading videos vilifying the birth control pill: Young women blaming their weight gain on the pill. Right-wing commentators claiming that some birth control can lead to infertility. Via The Washington Post:

Instead, many social media influencers recommend “natural” alternatives, such as timing sex to menstrual cycles — a less effective birth-control method that doctors warn could result in unwanted pregnancies in a country where abortion is now banned or restricted in nearly half the states.

Physicians say they’re seeing an explosion of birth-control misinformation online targeting a vulnerable demographic: people in their teens and early 20s who are more likely to believe what they see on their phones because of algorithms that feed them a stream of videos reinforcing messages often divorced from scientific evidence. While doctors say hormonal contraception — which includes birth-control pills and intrauterine devices (IUDs) — is safe and effective, they worry the profession’s long-standing lack of transparency about some of the serious but rare side effects has left many patients seeking information from unqualified online communities.

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