The Dark Side Of Birth Control

For 27 year-old Gena Steffens, quitting birth control was empowering, and alarming. “Why didn’t I do this sooner?” she asks. Like many women, she’s spent her entire adult life on synthetic hormones.

In the period of months after she stopped taking the pill, she experienced a series of strange things—the first of which was a sexual awakening.

Second, she felt happy. Steffens was diagnosed with depression shortly after she began taking birth control.

The series of revelations, and accounts from other women, made her realize that the symptoms she thought were normal (diminished libido, fatigue, anxiety, depression) were common side effects of birth control – something she never considered to be the culprit.

“The notion that these conditions are “normal” for women is reinforced so constantly in our society that I simply accepted that I was naturally a slightly sad, sexless lady,” she said. She suspects this is the case for many other women, too.

While she advocates and recognizes the importance of having access to birth control, its side effects shouldn’t be downplayed.

To end, Steffens said there’s a double standard that exists in medicine, noting “[…] women are technically only fertile for a few days out of the month, men, on the other hand, are reproductively fertile 365 days a year.”