In a 1966 feature on the morality of birth control, U.S. News and World Report asked, “Is the Pill regarded as a license for promiscuity? Can its availability to all women of childbearing age lead to sexual anarchy?”

Nowadays, fears of promiscuous women and “sexual anarchy” seem rightfully antiquated. In a new era of sexual liberation, one would think that those puritanical and regressive sentiments would disappear. However, these insidious beliefs just take new forms. Since sexual behavior has become increasingly blasé in this post-“Euphoria” world, detractors mask their disgust for women’s freedom with pseudoscientific jargon. 

TikTok has become a breeding ground for these opinions, with influencers claiming that “birth control is one of the most damaging things you can put in your body” and treating side effects like weight gain as reason enough to quit.

Putting aside the fact that the pill poses the same amount of danger as Tylenol or that pregnancy also causes weight gain, these opinions are actively embraced by influential figures like President Donald Trump’s nominee for surgeon general, Casey Means, a leader in the Make America Healthy Again movement. 

Birth control is a social and medical marvel. If women could be sexually active like men are without having to worry about pregnancy, then they could liberate themselves from the domestic sphere. It is also safe and effective. 

According to Scientific American, “The risks [i.e blood clots] associated with hormonal contraception are lower than the risk of pregnancy itself and comparable to those of other over-the-counter drugs.” Sara Berg, a news editor with the American Medical Association, wrote that if “birth-control pills [are] taken perfectly — there is a less than 1% chance of pregnancy.” 

This is not to invalidate any individual issues with hormonal birth control. Many criticisms that people levy about either the process of being prescribed birth control or the pill itself are legitimate. Healthy distrust of institutions, especially one set up by men that underresearches women’s medicine, is integral to critically assessing one’s own health. 

However, we must not throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to reproductive care. Just because women’s medicine is understudied does not mean that women should opt out of healthcare entirely. 

On Tucker Carlson’s podcast, Means bemoaned birth control as “disrespect[ful] of life,” though if she claims “disrespect of life,” she can’t be referring to the lives of women. Means used the phrase “creating life” four times in that interview. Each mention of “creating life” conveyed that Means prizes women as incubators for hypothetical future children rather than as people capable of self-determination. 

In the eyes of the anti-birth control movement, women are just future mothers. In this assessment, Means ignores the medical reasons that women may be on birth control separate from not wanting to conceive, including chronic illnesses like polycystic ovary syndrome (for which Means prescribes a change in diet to treat) or endometriosis, or even heavy periods and acne. Removing birth control access here endangers women’s health. 

Means has the ear of the Trump administration through her association with Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and this dangerous rhetoric could soon impact policy. In fact, the Trump administration has already destroyed $9.7 million in contraceptives for women in low-income countries and slashed Title X funding that subsidizes birth control for low-income women in the United States. 

“Now that we have RFK Jr. at the helm, legitimizing all this rhetoric in the name of MAHA, we’ve got the perfect storm of women being too scared or unable to get the birth control that would work best for them,” said Jennifer Lincoln, an OB-GYN, to Huffington Post.

It is no surprise that the anti-birth control movement is cropping up after the fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022. Not only did the right to privacy invoked in Roe apply to the right to contraception in Griswold v. Connecticut or Eisenstadt v. Baird, but birth control and abortion are both personal medical decisions about reproductive health. They are both about controlling one’s own reproductive destiny. They were both instrumental in ensuring women’s liberation in the public and private spheres. 

Betty Friedan summed up the social benefits of birth control best in her 1963 book “The Feminine Mystique,” writing that “the choice to be generative in other ways [not related to motherhood] can at last be made, and is being made by many women now, without guilt.” 

Pushing back against this anti-birth control movement requires not only opposing legislation that seeks to curb access to birth control but also opposing fear-mongering propaganda. Thankfully, USC has taken steps to ensure that students still have access to birth control through student healthcare services. Birth control did not lead to sexual anarchy, and removing its access will not make America healthy again.