The Pill: New me? Better me? Or somewhere in between?
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If you’ve never been in a room full of girls after about 9 PM, let me set the scene for you. You are going to hear some alarms and reminders going off from phones- it’s time to take your pill! And beware, if you are off by a minute- you may have a child! Or terrible acne! Or mood swings! The list goes on.
Women as young as 12 are prescribed oral birth control for a multitude of reasons. Acne, headaches, or severe menstrual periods can cause doctors to prescribe this medication well before women would want to use it for pregnancy prevention. But no matter the reason a woman chooses to use the pill, we have all experienced a terrifying array of symptoms to solve issues that you would think we’ve been focused on fixing in a better way for hundreds of years.
When you open up a birth control packet, out comes a paper listing all potential side effects, which when unwrapped, is the size of, say, your huge One Direction poster you used to hang on your wall. This daunting list includes warnings of blood clots, weight gain, extra bleeding, and even things as wild as changes to your eyesight. Most people would read these warnings and be completely scared away- however- as women, our choices are severely limited.
Say acne is your target with a birth control prescription. For young teens, the right dosage of the pill can successfully clear up acne. However, if your issue is more severe, and your dermatologist prescribes the popular prescription acne drug Accutane, women will oftentimes not be granted this prescription without pairing it with a birth control prescription, due to the effects Accutane can have on a fetus. Then you are stuck at a young age with some very serious side effects.
Besides the physical effects, conversations around birth control pills changing our entire personalities and demeanors have been whirring. Many female creators take to platforms such as TikTok to spew their opinions on the matter. Now of course, not everything we take in on these platforms is true. But as a young woman in college, it has me wondering: Was I a totally different person before starting the pill?
Many of us get to this point in our prescription where it seems scary to even try to function without it. We have all missed a day, and can feel nauseous or even bleed when we do. There are so many what ifs with stopping the pill, which leads many women to stay on it for many years, accepting even a chemical change to their entire personality.
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Seeing videos of women claiming to feel brand new when they stop the pill are rather discouraging- must women really endure health problems in order to keep their identity, or sacrifice their identity to not experience the health problems? Women are put between a rock and a hard place just to exist. We always seem to take the brunt of America’s overwhelmingly masculine healthcare practices.
Male birth control has been joked about for years- after all, is it easier to take the bullets out of the gun or to wear a bullet proof vest? At the beginning of March in 2022, researchers were set to present a non hormonal option for men. Great, they won’t even experience the same struggle as us.
If something like oral birth control were to be approved for men, I can only imagine the deeply rooted misogynistic ideals coming out of even the seemingly most reasonable men. I can predict claims of “why should we switch when women have it down,” and so on. Why should they ever be the one to take any responsibility- even when conception cannot happen without them.
I think it’s time men help make life a little easier for women should this concept come to fruition. And an examination of how the medical world treats young women, especially women of color, is long overdue.
Strike Out,
Writer: Jordan Ross
Athens, Georgia