Physicians say they’re seeing an explosion of birth-control misinformation online targeting a vulnerable demographic: people in their teens and early 20s who are more likely to believe what they see on their phones because of algorithms that feed them a stream of videos reinforcing messages often divorced from scientific evidence. While doctors say hormonal contraception — which includes birth-control pills and intrauterine devices (IUDs) — is safe and effective, they worry the profession’s long-standing lack of transparency about some of the serious but rare side effects has left many patients seeking information from unqualified online communities.

  • auth
    32•7 months ago

    make abortion illegal and then create propaganda against birth control… lol…

      • @Droggelbecher
        23•7 months ago

        Can you imagine being one production error or briefly misplaced fingernail away from ruining your life? Condoms are reasonably safe, but as your only form of birth control and with no access to abortion, i just wouldn’t risk it. Would be 100% no piv for me.

        • @[email protected]
          14•7 months ago

          And condoms suck, so there’s a huge temptation for men to remove them for better feel.

          Birth control of all forms should be widely available and people should choose what’s best for them.

  • BarqsHasBiteEnglish
    13•7 months ago

    Hasn’t this been a long standing thing? Woman online will say birth control screws with them, which doesn’t line up with official data.

    • @[email protected]OP
      24•7 months ago

      It does have some very real side effects, and it does have some quite rare ones which are incredibly dangerous. But being pregnant has much worse side effects and a much much higher risk of lethality.

      The big difference is that it’s actually keeping people off birth control rather than shifting women to the minipill if they actually have problems.

      • @[email protected]
        4•7 months ago

        There are also multiple forms of birth control for women, and most people can find one that works well for them.

      • @Buddahriffic
        2•7 months ago

        Yeah my ex almost died from her birth control when her incompetent doctor neglected to do the blood tests he was supposed to do while she was on it and had made up his mind that she was full of shit before she even came to him about blacking out randomly and coming to in weird places or her organs slowly shutting down. And when a different doctor made the connection, her main doctor still wanted her to finish her current course, even though it was killing her.

    • @[email protected]OP
      5•7 months ago

      Yeah. Somebody set up a bot with multiple accounts on multiple servers, generating tens of thousands of identical comments in numerous communities.

      Unfortunately, mbin and kbin don’t support federated comment removals, so some people still see the spam