Social Media Birth Control Misinformation and Disinformation (free issue)

Putting women's lives at risk

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Birth control has been an integral part of Western society for decades now. The science is quite simple. Stop the sperm from reach the egg and it can’t get fertilized. Or if the egg is fertilized, stop it from implanting. Of course, it’s not really quite that simple, because one has to obtain the birth control methods in the first place. In a perfect world, where anyone could do so, the number of unwanted pregnancies would plummet. One would think that’s a good thing. Sadly, some don’t feel that way.

Photo by Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition on Unsplash

I shouldn’t have been surprised the other day when I read a news article that explained how women are going off birth control because of the misinformation (and I’d argue, disinformation) online, specifically on TikTok and Instagram.

(If you’re not sure of the difference between misinformation and disinformation, I wrote about it here on Decipher Your Health.)

This isn’t new. I found several articles dating back a few years saying that social media content about birth control is misleading, like this one from Glamour.com and this one from Wired. And now it’s being reported in papers like The Washington Post. This article, Women are getting off birth control amid misinformation explosion, really caught my eye.

The authors related how many influencers are pushing so-called natural alternatives to hormonal contraception, which we all know can have high failure rates. They interviewed an OB/GYN from Washington, D.C., who said that women are seeking abortions because of unwanted pregnancies that occurred after they followed social media advice on birth control.

Much of the misinformation is easily debunked by common sense or research. One influencer, according to the Washington Post article, told her viewers that some types of birth control put them at higher risk of contracting a sexually transmitted infection. But if you think about it, it’s not the birth control that puts you at higher risk, it’s how you use it. If you’re on the pill to prevent pregnancy, it’s not going to prevent STIs. You still need to use a condom to prevent that. But it’s not the pill that causes the risk, it’s the lack of the barrier. The problem is people who spread that type of misinformation are not willing to actually explain the issue.

Abortion laws make it even scarier

As if the chance of an unwanted pregnancy wasn’t bad enough a few years ago, it’s even scarier now in much of the U.S., where abortion laws in many states are getting stricter and stricter. The physician interviewed for the Washington Post article said many of the patients they are seeing for abortions come from Texas, Idaho, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. And just yesterday, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that a near-total abortion ban from – get this – almost 200 years ago can be enforced. The near-total ban, with only exceptions of the mother’s life being in danger, joins that of 14 other states.

Photo by Anastasiia Chepinska on Unsplash

So if women follow the so-called influencers’ birth control advice and end up pregnant anyway, what can they do? They’re told they must have that baby, that they were trying not to get pregnant with in the first place. According to the CDC, fertility awareness-based methods of contraception fail up to 23% of the time.

Yes, hormonal birth control does fail from time to time. Sometimes it’s because the woman didn’t use or take the contraception properly or sometimes it fails. But the failure rate is lower with hormonal birth control:

• Implants have a typical user failure rate of 0.1%

• Injections of progestin, 4%

• Combined oral contraceptives (the pill), 7%

• Progestin-only pill, 7%

• Contraceptive patch, 7%

• Hormonal vaginal contraceptive ring, 7%

Barrier methods have a higher failure rate:

• Diaphragms or cervical caps, 17%

• Sponge, 14% for women who have never had a baby, 27% for those who have

• Male condom, 13%

• Female condom, 21%

• Spermicides, 21%

So what can we do to combat the misinformation and disinformation about birth control on social media? What do you think? Leave your comment below. Let’s get a conversation going.