Ashley Hamrick’s doctor was trying to get to the bottom of something: Why, exactly, did Ms. Hamrick want to get off birth control? “Are you feeling any side effects?”
No, that wasn’t it. Ms. Hamrick, who was 26 at the time, felt normal. No unusual weight gain, no mood swings. But a couple of questions had wormed their way into her mind and lodged themselves there: Who am I without birth control? Will I feel some sort of difference coming off it?
Ms. Hamrick had started taking birth control pills a decade earlier, when she was 15. Now, as she browsed her social media feeds, she kept stumbling on videos of women saying how much better they felt when they stopped taking the pills, content she wasn’t seeking out. The posts typically went like this: a glowing blonde in a workout top — the picture of health! — saying that she had stopped taking birth control pills and immediately felt more clarity of mind. Like an emotional fog had lifted, like she was a brand-new, much happier person.
Ms. Hamrick’s doctor was clear with her. If she wasn’t experiencing any side effects, there was no reason to stop taking birth control. Ms. Hamrick wasn’t so sure. The more videos about the pill she watched, the more skeptical she became, and the more she felt drawn toward experimenting. She was, after all, in a moment of change. She had moved, on a whim, from Indiana to Texas. Soon after settling near Houston she met a guy and they started dating, then looking at engagement rings.
Just over a year since Ms. Hamrick decided to stop taking the pills, she has figured out who she is without birth control: She is a mother. Her baby is four months old.
Three years since the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson, birth control has also become a more contested terrain, politically but also socially and culturally.
On YouTube, podcast hosts with followings in the millions rail against hormonal contraceptives, alarming doctors around the country who are now hearing their patients repeat these sentiments.
Alex Clark, the popular Turning Point USA podcaster, has suggested that the way women are prescribed birth control is indirectly linked to “major fertility issues” (because of the underlying health issues it might mask), or that birth control can change who women are attracted to (“*whispers* the birth control pill can falsely make women feel bisexual,” Ms. Clark posted on X), which doctors say is untrue. In an appearance on Joe Rogan’s show, Calley Means, now an adviser to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said that the medical industry views birth control as “recurring revenue”: “Oh interesting,” Mr. Means said with a conspiratorial lilt. “You can actually convince someone to take a pill for years, for almost most of their life.”
Go to TikTok and look up the words “birth control” and a stream of videos appears showing women venting about the pill. There are videos of women saying that birth control pills lead to infertility. There are also videos of women discussing its real potential side effects: water weight gain, depression, loss of libido, irregular bleeding, all of which can be true for some people.
In one TikTok video, a woman sits in her car in a Trader Joe’s parking lot, describing overwhelming nausea under the caption: “My hate for the birth control pill runs deep.” In another, a woman rattles off the pill’s side effects, declaring birth control “one of the most damaging things you can put in your body.” Some women describe getting off birth control to try to lose weight; some say they are now pregnant, adding emojis like a crying face, a laugh-crying face or a shrug.
Earlier this year, a study by public health researchers at La Trobe University found that among the top 100 TikTok videos about reproductive health, just 10 percent were from medical professionals, and about 50 percent of creators made comments rejecting hormonal contraception. The top 100 most popular posts on TikTok about birth control had amassed some five billion views.
In more than a dozen interviews with young women of different political leanings across the country, many said these TikTok videos and podcast clips were making them feel at turns curious and anxious, wondering whether to trust their doctors or the influencers promising greener, healthier pastures far from conventional medical guidance about contraceptives.
A 27-year-old in San Diego, Julianna Stein, said that after nearly a decade using hormonal birth control, it “clicked” for her that she needed to know what it felt like to experience her period without it; a 24-year-old in Ogden, Utah, Lindsey Harper, said she went off the pill nearly four years ago and told her 90,000 TikTok followers that she views hormonal birth control as “evil.” (“Obviously I exaggerate,” Ms. Harper added. “On social media you can’t have a lukewarm take.”)
“We are not given full informed consent when it comes to the pill,” said Ms. Clark, host of the conservative wellness podcast “Culture Apothecary,” in an interview with The Times. Ms. Clark began taking hormonal birth control as a teenager and stopped in 2018, eventually switching to tracking her menstrual cycle on her phone. She said she has used the apps Flo and 28, the last of which was founded by the creators of the conservative Evie Magazine and backed by the right-wing kingmaker Peter Thiel. Both are part of a fast-growing, multibillion-dollar market for women’s health technology.
Ms. Clark insists that her anti-birth control discussions aren’t connected to the pronatalist messaging of Turning Point USA, or her boss there: “The Charlie Kirks of the world are out here being like, ‘You need to have babies and get married younger.’ Then you’ve got me, who works for him, saying, ‘You need to be questioning birth control.’ They’re totally unrelated. All women in general should be questioning the pill.”
But the deluge of podcasts and social media posts criticizing birth control — and not just on the right — has many concerned about the mounting legal and political efforts to block access to oral contraceptives.
This spring, more than a dozen public health organizations sued the Trump administration, arguing that it had undercut access to health services including birth control by withholding Title X funds. Looming Medicaid cuts, which would leave millions of Americans without health coverage, also threaten to limit access to contraceptives.
Until recently, it hadn’t seemed like this moment — with influencers promising bliss and mental clarity post-birth control — was leading to any change in how women in the United States were using it. But last month, Trilliant Health, a health care analytics company, conducted an analysis for The Times and found a decrease in the use of hormonal birth control pills among some women ages 18 to 44. In 2019, 13.1 percent of women said they used the pill; in 2024, that number fell to 10.2 percent.
Unlike previous analyses by Trilliant, which found a small rise in birth control usage during a slightly earlier time period, this one focused on women with private insurance, which provides coverage for a majority of women in this age group. It is possible that some women are switching from pills to intrauterine devices, which were not included in the pill analysis. Trilliant’s research also showed there were more visits for I.U.D. insertion than removal for that age group during that time.
Researchers at the Guttmacher Institute, which supports abortion rights, say they have not seen an indication of a population level decrease in hormonal contraceptive use in their analyses of data from the National Center for Health Statistics.
Still, reproductive health doctors are worried about the new and growing doubts they are hearing. Dr. Nisha Verma, a physician in Maryland and Georgia, and a senior adviser to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said she often fields questions from patients that seem to echo dubious podcast talking points — about hormonal contraception causing infertility, or even changing who women are sexually attracted to.
Scholars worry that the legal efforts to restrict access to birth control will be buoyed by the podcasts and social media posts criticizing it. “If we look at what happened between Roe v. Wade and Dobbs, we see a steady escalation of the stigmatization of abortions, and a steady escalation of legal restrictions on the provision of abortion care,” said Amanda Stevenson, a sociologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
“Those two processes, stigmatization and legal restrictions,” she added, “are mutually reinforcing.”
At the same time, the messaging on social media is resonating with women who feel as if they have been brushed off by their doctors when raising valid worries. Nearly a quarter of women between 15 and 49 either take hormonal pills or have an I.U.D., and many are prescribed birth control before they’re sexually active, to help with managing their periods, acne or symptoms of endometriosis.
“They kind of want to throw birth control on people and not listen to every individual’s concern,” said Jaden Moretti-Leipf, 23, who works as a dog trainer in Rhode Island and earlier this year stopped using hormonal birth control. “I think they cover it up and say take this, and that’s the end of it.”
‘I Want to Be Pure’
Leaving her gynecologist’s office, after first raising the idea of going off birth control, Ms. Hamrick was disturbed. It seemed to her that her doctor had dismissed her concerns. But how could she be so sure? After all, Ms. Hamrick could see that the paper in her oral contraceptive package listed all sorts of potential side effects: nausea, stomach pain, irregular bleeding. She decided she would stop seeing that doctor.
Soon after, Ms. Hamrick sat down with her boyfriend, Ken Contreras, 28, whom she’d been dating for less than a year, and talked about her interest in experimenting with going off hormonal birth control pills, asking him how he felt. They didn’t feel entirely ready for a child. They thought they ought to wait two more years so they could get married, save money and enjoy the end of their 20s.
Still, he understood and was supportive. “I agree with Ashley,” Mr. Contreras said, adding that he had researched the side effects of birth control. “Doctors suggest it, but they don’t really talk about every downside to it.”
“I decided to cut it cold turkey,” Ms. Hamrick recalled, “Which I know they don’t always tell you to do.” Right away, she felt a burst of new energy. Her brain seemed less foggy. She didn’t start a new method of birth control. “We weren’t being the most safe on not having kids,” she said. “From time to time, we used condoms.” Four months later, she was pregnant.
In the early months of her pregnancy last year, from her home near Houston, she read news about the changing reproductive health laws in Texas. Some stories left her sick with worry. She wondered what would happen if she had a pregnancy complication and the physician had to chose between prioritizing her own health or that of her fetus. “I can make another child,” she told her partner. “You can’t have another of me.”
The two debated whether they should temporarily leave Texas and go somewhere with fewer restrictions on abortion, like her own home state, Indiana, or his hometown in Canada. As someone who had always been upbeat, Ms. Hamrick couldn’t understand why she felt so despondent. “Am I depressed?” she wondered. “Do I really feel like this?”
Others who questioned birth control the way Ms. Hamrick did say it’s been a smooth transition for them.
Ms. Moretti-Leipf, in Rhode Island, started feeling a fuzzy sense of skepticism about the pills after scrolling through TikTok videos. She said her doctor tried to talk her out of going off hormonal birth control, but she decided to try tracking her cycle naturally and is still happily off the pill, even recommending it to friends and some of her dog training clients.
Doctors are struggling to figure out what to tell patients who are arriving in their exam rooms consumed by new doubts. Dr. Kimberly Warner, a gynecologist at Kaiser Permanente in Denver, tells them there is no one-size-fits-all approach, that she wants to to help them find a form of contraception that is right for them, whether that is hormonal pills, condoms or something else.
Dr. Jennifer Peña, chief medical officer for the reproductive telehealth platform Wisp, says she sees dozens of patients a year who come to her with worries often rooted in misinformation: “‘Is an IUD going to make me infertile?’ ‘If I get off birth control, how long will it take to get out of my system?’ ‘How can I do this naturally, with an Oura ring?’ ‘I want to be pure!’”
She traces many of these sentiments to wellness influencers. “There’s a cry for identity,” Dr. Peña said. “Social media is becoming the algorithm for education, and once there’s a trend it becomes the norm for topics of conversation inside clinics.”
These conversations on social media are jarring for some people who had a hard time getting contraceptives in the first place, which is how Angel Mayfield, 21, feels. Ms. Mayfield is a student at the historically Black Florida A&M University. She grew up in a Christian household and started taking birth control pills as a high school sophomore after getting a prescription and ordering them online from Planned Parenthood. It was $50 monthly and she paid for it herself, using the money she made working at Walmart. “I didn’t even tell my mom,” Ms. Mayfield recalled. “But she eventually ended up finding out.”
Now Ms. Mayfield is disturbed to hear from friends who seem to think birth control is not worth the side effects. Every few weeks last spring, Ms. Mayfield set up a table in the center of her college campus and handed out packages of birth control pills and emergency contraceptives.
“The biggest thing I see on social media is this earthy, green-girl lifestyle-type shebang,” Ms. Mayfield said. “It’s like a trendy aesthetic.”
‘Me Without Birth Control’
Just last month, Ms. Hamrick finished her maternity leave. She is now navigating a new period of shaky identity as she tries to figure out who she is as a mother. During her leave, she felt isolated as she watched her partner leave for work in the morning while she was confined to home. Sometimes she lashed out. “I was taking it out on him,” she said. “My whole life felt on pause.” Going on antidepressants helped.
“It’s life-changing,” Mr. Contreras said of parenthood. “I don’t think anybody really plans — I mean they plan for it, some people it happens with the perfect timing and some people it doesn’t,.”
To Ms. Hamrick, birth control doesn’t seem like a “political” topic. She wants women to feel emboldened to challenge their doctors about contraception, instead of passively accepting being put on the pill as teenagers in order to manage their periods.
Mary Ziegler, a legal historian and author of several history books about reproductive health, views the birth control discussions differently. She said she worried that the “wellness arguments” against birth control echo a strategy that opponents of abortion used — trying to appeal to those who aren’t opposed to it for political reasons but are simply being told they should “reject it because it’s bad for you.”
Recently, Ms. Hamrick went back on birth control pills. “I don’t want to get pregnant again,” she told her doctor.
Emma Goldberg is a business reporter covering workplace culture and the ways work is evolving in a time of social and technological change.
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