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.
The backlash to birth control comes at a time of rampant misinformation about basic health tenets amid poor digital literacy and a wider political debate over reproductive rights, in which far-right conservatives argue that broad acceptance of birth control has altered traditional gender roles and weakened the family.
Physicians and researchers say little data is available about the scale of this new phenomenon, but anecdotally, more patients are coming in with misconceptions about birth control fueled by influencers and conservative commentators.
“People are putting themselves out there as experts on birth control and speaking to things that the science does not bear out,” said Michael Belmonte, an OB/GYN in D.C. and a family planning expert with the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG). “I am seeing those direct failures of this misinformation.”
He says women frequently come in for abortions after believing what they see on social media about the dangers of hormonal birth control and the effectiveness of tracking periods to prevent pregnancy. Many of these patients have traveled from states that have completely or partly banned abortions, he said, including Texas, Idaho, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina.
Doctors stand a better chance of dispelling misinformation when they listen to patients’ concerns, said Belmonte, noting that some are more worried about the side effects of birth control than the effectiveness doctors have long been trained to emphasize. He has adopted ACOG’s recommendation that physicians candidly discuss common side effects such as nausea, headaches, breast tenderness and bleeding between periods; many of these resolve on their own or can be mitigated by switching forms of birth control.
Women of color whose communities have historically been exploited by the medical establishment may be particularly vulnerable to misinformation, given the long history of mistrust around birth control in this country, said Kimberly Baker, an assistant professor at UTHealth Houston School of Public Health. Forced sterilizations of tens of thousands of primarily Black, Latina and Indigenous women happened under U.S. government programs in the 20th century.
“That’s another huge reason why these negative videos around birth control get a lot of fanfare, because there’s already the stigma attached to it, and that’s steeped in our history,” she said.
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