Please don’t tell me it’s just hormonal
My menstrual cycle this month lasted 16 days and was a week after the cycle before that. According to the Mayo Clinic, “menstrual flow might occur every 21 to 35 days and last two to seven days.” I bled for three weeks.
I started using the birth control pill when I was 16 as a method to control my menstrual cycle.
As a competitive runner for both cross country and track and field, I was constantly pushing my body to its limits — always reaching for a new personal record. With that came amenorrhea, the absence of menstruation that is often associated with those with eating disorders and professional athletes. Severely underweight and constantly working out, the energy I was exerting didn’t match up with the energy I consumed, forcing my body to find energy elsewhere — my reproductive system. As an exhausted junior in high school, I didn’t stop to think about the long-term effects of the pill on my developing body, and my doctor at the time mentioned nothing of it. Perhaps it was because scientists today still don’t know for sure what these effects are.
A 2020 systematic review article conducted by researchers from Stavanger University Hospital found that hormonal contraceptive drugs resulted in “structural and functional changes in areas involved in affective and cognitive processing, such as the amygdala, hippocampus, prefrontal cortex and cingulate gyrus.” However, out of the 33 articles that met their inclusion criteria, only one study had an adolescent sample population.
The study’s conclusion states the following: “There is a need for systematic research that considers the differences in formulation and administration of the various contraceptive drugs, employing a longitudinal, within-subject design with matched and randomized control groups consisting of HC-naïve subjects.”
If more research is needed, why are women and young girls across the world continuing to be prescribed hormonal contraceptives?
My first type of birth control pill stopped working three years ago, with my menstrual symptoms only worsening. Since then, my doctors have told me the same old story, “Women often face inconsistencies with their period, and you’re currently on a low dosage of hormones so let’s try a different one.”
I’ve been on Estarylla, Hailey and Isibloom. Just last week, I was prescribed another new one during my visit to my OB-GYN.
Despite my pleas and story about how the past three birth control pills have only made my period worse and taking a break from them didn’t help either, the woman that sat in front of me who claimed to be my doctor, an advocate for my wellbeing, said the same thing all the other doctors said: “It’s probably just hormonal.”
Maybe it is. But I don’t know for a fact that it isn’t.
Uterine fibroids are noncancerous masses found in the uterus that often go unnoticed but other times can cause heavy menstrual bleeding and pelvic pain. According to the Mayo Clinic Dr. Michelle Louie, who specializes in minimally invasive gynecologic surgery, “75 to 80% of people with a uterus will be diagnosed with fibroids at some point in their lives. These growths often show up … most commonly in your 20s to 30s … Each case is a bit different.”
Without even checking, my OB-GYN claimed the solution to my problem was a pill.
According to Grand View Research, “The U.S. contraceptive market size was valued at around USD 8.0 billion in 2021 and is projected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of around 4.70% in the forecast period.”
So while everyone with a uterus has to choose a form of birth control that results in compromising some form of their health, the birth control industry grows richer and more ignorant of how much their products harm their patients. To make matters worse, the issue with birth control doesn’t end with misogyny, capitalism and a lack of research.
American political activist Angela Davis wrote about the eugenic influence on the birth control movement in her book “Women, Race & Class,” detailing how “birth control activists” such as Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, and Guy Irving Birch, director of the American Eugenics Society, advocated for contraceptives as a hidden method of genocide during the 20th century.
“The abortion rights activists of the early 1970s should have examined the history of their movement. Had they done so … they might have understood how important it was to undo the racist deeds of their predecessors, who had advocated birth control as well as compulsory sterilization as a means of eliminating the ‘unfit’ sectors of the population,” Davis wrote.
In the 1950s, the first clinical trials for birth control pills were tested on Puerto Rican women who didn’t even know the pills were experimental. The trials left three women dead without any official investigations as to why.
Then, despite its denied approval by the United States Federal Drug Administration in 1967, “Depo-Provera was still used on 14,000 women at the Grady Clinic in Atlanta, Georgia, between 1967 and 1978,” as cited by Cambridge University Press. The majority of these women eventually developed cancer with their deaths undisclosed to the FDA.
Just from these two incidents in history, it’s more than evident that the history of birth control and healthcare for people with uteruses is littered with misogyny and racism. And it continues to remain this way.
In honor of Women’s History Month, it’s time we acknowledge that birth control has never truly worked outside of harming women of color. To all those who use hormonal contraceptive methods currently, acknowledge those who suffered for the resources you have now. And to those who make hormonal contraceptive methods, take your half-assed efforts elsewhere and start making options that actually work, not hurt. We aren’t your guinea pigs, if you want to experiment with human life to make money, do it on those with penises for a change.