LEILA FADEL, HOST:
As part of NPR's Population Shift series, we've been spending this week looking at how families make decisions about if and when to have children - decisions made possible in part because of hormonal birth control. Now there's a growing social media trend that shows women quitting their hormonal birth control, even though they're not ready to become parents. Doctors are worried that some women are making decisions based on inaccurate medical information they see online. Lexie Schapitl reports on how TikTok and Instagram have become the new WebMD for family planning.
LEXIE SCHAPITL, BYLINE: Charlotte Freed (ph) first got a hormonal IUD as a teenager. She wasn't sexually active at the time, but she wanted to be protected from pregnancy before she started college. This was also a time when she experienced anxiety, depression and fatigue. But it wasn't until years later, when a friend of hers quit her birth control and recommended a book on the topic, that Freed started wondering if these things could be connected.
CHARLOTTE FREED: It was really upsetting and almost, like, a little disturbing that no doctor had ever brought it up. And honestly, I was like, I kind of just want to, like, meet myself in a way that I hadn't since I was, you know, 16, 17.
SCHAPITL: So Freed took out her IUD. Social media is full of stories about women like Freed quitting or questioning hormonal birth control, but not because they want to get pregnant. Some are concerned about effects on their mood and mental health. Others say doctors dismissed their complaints about weight gain, nausea and decreased sex drive. But doctors and researchers say misleading and inaccurate claims about birth control, which decades of research has shown to be safe and effective, abound on social platforms. And they worry those claims are turning some women off the medication and could lead to unintended pregnancies.
FRANZISKA HAYDANEK: It's important to kind of look at the difference between disinformation and misinformation.
SCHAPITL: Franziska Haydanek is an OB-GYN who uses social media to educate her followers about different birth control methods.
HAYDANEK: I think it's totally appropriate that people share their negative experiences with any sort of surgery, medication, whatever. What's not OK is when it's, like, done purposely, and that's when we get into the disinformation.
SCHAPITL: A 2024 study analyzed posts about birth control on TikTok and found that nearly half of the posts on the topic were discouraging women from using it. Stats like that motivated Jennifer Lincoln, an OB-GYN based in Portland, Oregon, to start debunking false claims on Instagram - claims like...
JENNIFER LINCOLN: That birth control is bad for you. It gives you infertility. It causes cancer. It makes you not attracted to your partner. It causes abortions. You name it, somebody on social media has said it.
SCHAPITL: And Lincoln worries that young people are using social media like a search engine for medical advice.
LINCOLN: And it might be somebody who says that who has a blue check mark, who even has doctor in their name, but they might not be a medical doctor. And they're selling you something, or, you know, they're promising you something that has made up for the gap in the health care system.
ALEX CLARK: I feel like women haven't been given true informed consent when it comes to the hormonal birth control pill.
SCHAPITL: That's conservative podcast host Alex Clark. She argues birth control is overprescribed and used as a Band-Aid that can mask more serious underlying issues. Clark took the pill for nearly 10 years before stopping. Now she steers her listeners toward options like condoms and cycle tracking, which do not contain hormones and have much higher failure rates.
CLARK: I think that if women were told the truth about hormonal birth control in general, that they would choose other options. I think just the more educated women become on it, that they're just going to say, yeah, nah, I'm good. I think they're just going to choose something else.
SCHAPITL: Dr. Jennifer Lincoln believes her colleagues should do more to explain the facts around birth control. She says social media is filling a vacuum that gets created when doctors rush their patients through appointments or brush off concerns about symptoms.
LINCOLN: The medical field owns so much of why people are going to these forums and Reddit and TikTok for information and are really buying it because they have been - we have failed them.
SCHAPITL: When Charlotte Freed took out her IUD, she did notice improvements in her mood. She had more energy. She felt more connected to her body, and she got reacquainted with her cycle. Then she was going abroad for graduate school, and her calculation changed.
FREED: Either the trade-off is, like, the possibility of having a child when you don't want to, the possibility of, like, hormones kind of messing up your personality or increasing anxiety, depression, fatigue, whatever. So it's a lose-lose situation.
SCHAPITL: She decided she couldn't take the risk of getting pregnant in a foreign country. Ultimately, Freed got a new IUD for now.
Lexie Schapitl, NPR News, Washington. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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