The Anti-Pill Pipeline

If you're a woman under, say, 40, it's very likely these are the sorts of videos you've been getting in your feed.

It starts with a kind of normal-looking discussion on the side effects of the pill, but it very quickly escalates to a woman walking through the woods with a daisy chain on her head talking about divine feminine energy.

But before we get into why this is happening, I want to give you a brief rundown of the pill and its history.

When was it introduced in the UK and how it's revolutionized women's lives? So hormonal contraception includes the pill, but it also includes the hormonal coil or the IUD, the implant, the patch, the injection and the ring.

And these work by releasing a synthetic version of estrogen and or progesterone that prevents pregnancy by stopping the ovaries from releasing the egg.

or by thickening the cervical mucus or thinning the uterine lining.

There are two types of pill, the combined pill and the mini pill.

The combined pill has both hormones, the mini pill has just progesterone.

So the pill was the first type of widely available hormonal contraception.

It's over 99% effective when used properly and it's estimated that about 70% of all women in Britain have used the pill at some stage in their lives, which is huge.

It's been called the greatest scientific invention of the 20th century, and rightly so.

In the UK in the 1950s, only 35% of women were working.

Now it's over 72% of women.

The pill gave women the freedom to get an education, work, travel, and to not have to marry young because of pregnancy.

It was introduced in the UK in 1961, but it wasn't the overnight boom that people often assume it was.

The government didn't want to look like they were encouraging promiscuity or aligning with the free love movement of the 60s.

So doctors would only prescribe it to married women who had had children already and didn't want any more.

You can literally go to your doctor and ask for the pill and they could say, nah, I'm not going to give it to you just because you don't have enough kids yet.

Or you only have one kid, so maybe have another? Can you imagine? It wasn't until the 70s that family planning clinics could prescribe the pill to unmarried and, God forbid, childless women.

That was when things really changed.

So it was a really long process, and without the pill, we wouldn't be able to be where we are now.

We'd probably both be at home churning butter with one hand and holding a baby locked to our nipple with the other, which is actually what a lot of people are advocating for for women, but we'll get to that later.

If you're a millennial woman, it's very likely you went on the pill as a teenager or young adult, not just for contraception, but because the hormones can help with cramps, acne and PMS.

And we all remember opening up the box and pulling out the side effects sheet, which is the size of a fucking eight man tent.

But it's so big because it lists all the side effects from common to rare and extremely rare.