Contraceptive side effects have put women like me off the pill forever
A new report says that one in seven women are unhappy with the side effects of their current contraception. Olivia Petter says she isn’t surprised – women’s reproductive health has never been taken seriously
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Every woman I know has a story about contraception – and none of them are good. In fact, some of them describe the worst mental and physical health issues they’ve experienced, from incessant bleeding and severe acne to manic episodes and suicidal ideation.
So when a new report from the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) revealed that one in seven women are unhappy with the side effects of their current contraception, I wasn’t remotely surprised. The only thing that shocks me is that the figure wasn’t higher.
The report, which is part of BPAS’s new campaign, The Contraception Conversation, highlights how urgent reform is needed across all areas of reproductive healthcare. The findings, which are based on a survey of 1,000 women, showed that nearly half (49 per cent) of women face barriers when it comes to accessing their preferred method of contraception. These include long wait times, difficulty securing appointments, and financial hurdles.
Meanwhile, 84 per cent of women have switched their contraception methods at least once, and only 21 per cent are currently using oral contraception. Nearly a third of respondents (28 per cent) have no main method of contraception. I am one of those women, as are all of my single female friends.
We’ve long accepted contraception horror stories as our reality. This one gives you bad skin. That one can make you depressed. This one made me put on weight. Oh, and don’t go near that one – it made me bleed for a year and then fell out of me in the shower.
These are the things women tell themselves and each other from the moment we start menstruating. And it’s easy to repeat them, like some insufferable, insipid jingle, without ever questioning why we put up with any of it.
I’ve written about all this before, and detailed how my time on the hormonal coil coincided with a set of severe depressive episodes that went away the second I came off it. Friends have had worse experiences that I won’t detail here for fear of contributing to a culture of scaremongering, but it’s worth noting how extremely common these kinds of stories are.
The thing is, we shouldn’t demonise contraception, hormonal or otherwise, as seems to be the current trend on social media. To do that would be to wilfully misunderstand and distract from the larger problem at play here, which is that women’s reproductive healthcare is not – and never has been – prioritised to the degree it needs to be in order to give us the agency to make informed choices about which contraceptives will and will not work for our bodies and minds.
Because of the lack of investment in contraceptive services, and a lack of funding for research into non-hormonal contraceptives (as well as the male contraceptive pill), women are forced into treating their health like a game. Every new contraceptive we try is a roll of the dice, because we have no way of knowing how something will affect us until we try it. And that’s not going to change until the government wakes up to the severity of all this and takes action.
Why is it so severe? Well, horrific side effects aside, it’s putting women off trying new forms of long-acting contraception that might work perfectly well for them. It’s just that none of us want to take the risk – which, in turn, forces us into taking other risks, such as the risk of an unwanted pregnancy if something goes awry (cue an entirely different set of problems as we begin a journey into yet another woefully underfunded female healthcare service if we choose to have an abortion).
Trust me, if there was a contraceptive out there that I knew would work for me and give me zero side effects, I’d sign up tomorrow. But I’m not aware of one, so I’ve chosen what I believe to be the lesser of two evils in terms of risk-taking. It really is a lose-lose scenario, whichever way you look at it.
The BPAS report highlights everything women have known for a long time. I just hope the government will now start to take us, and our healthcare, seriously.