On TikTok and Instagram, a chorus of young influencers are advising women in their age bracket to ditch their hormonal birth control pills, saying they cause a cavalcade of problems for physical and mental health.
The only problem? Unless you also ditch men entirely, going off birth control means it’s statistically way likelier that you’re going to get pregnant.
Look no further than a Texas-based young woman named Ashley Hamrick, who recently told the New York Times about her decision to go off her birth control pills, after more than a decade taking them, when she ran across a corner of social media full of glowing, anti-pill influencers advising her to do so.
Hamrick, aged 26 when she stopped taking the pill, began to wonder whether birth control pills were right for her while watching these beatific young women talking about how much clearer their minds felt following their decision to stop using prescription contraceptives.
“Who am I without birth control?” she recalled pondering to the NYT. “Will I feel some sort of difference coming off it?”
Perturbed, the young woman’s doctor told her that if she wasn’t having any negative side effects — which, as Hamrick told the NYT, she wasn’t — there was no reason to go off the pill. Instead of heeding that advice, she felt dismissed by the doctor, and decided to sit down with her partner, Ken Contreras, who she’d been with less than a year at the time, to discuss.
Though neither felt ready to be parents, Contreras ultimately decided that his partner’s choice was the most important thing to consider. So Hamrick stopped taking the pill, and the couple didn’t begin using any different method to prevent pregnancy.
Four months of non-contraceptive sex later, nature took its course, and Hamrick got pregnant — and it couldn’t have happened at a worse time in recent political history.
During the early months of her pregnancy in 2024, Hamrick watched in horror as Texas continued enacting its draconian post-Roe agenda, not only banning abortion in almost all scenarios but also, due to the confusing letter of the law, all but cosigned the deaths of mothers in favor of the lives of their fetuses.
Terrified of such an outcome, the couple began considering leaving the Longhorn State — and perhaps even the country — for their safety. Thinking about that very real possibility, Hamrick felt “despondent,” as she told the paper.
“Am I depressed?” she wondered during that terrifying time. “Do I really feel like this?”
Those hard feelings didn’t end with political anxiety. During her maternity leave, while Hamrick was stuck at home and her partner went off to work, she found herself frustrated and isolated as she watched him.
“I was taking it out on him,” Hamrick told the NYT. “My whole life felt on pause.”
With her maternity leave complete, Hamrick is now reckoning with the experience of being a young mother. While many of these so-called “wellness influencers” preach against birth control and the ways it “ruined” their bodies, very few post honestly about the realities that accompany a lack of contraception.
For Hamrick, those realities came hard and fast, first with getting pregnant and then experiencing anxiety, depression, and anger while she handled a pregnancy she wasn’t ready for. She’s also gone on antidepressants, another target of the faux-wellness right wing, including health secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Ultimately, Hamrick also went back on the pill.
“I don’t want to get pregnant again,” she told the NYT.
More on pregnancy: Mainstream Publications Are Getting Suckered by a Ridiculous Fake News Story About a “Pregnancy Robot”