Alien Anatomy

My mother meant well. My ob-gyn wasn’t deliberately lying. Yet I still feel like I was duped into treating my body like a stranger.

I was put on birth control at 15.

Until a few years ago, this sentence wouldn’t have carried much weight for me. A simple factual reality, common to many of my friends born in the 1980s. Our mothers went to university, got on the pill, got married, stopped the pill, had kids. Those were decades full of hope and rock-solid belief in scientific progress, and words like “liberation” and “choice” still meant a bright future for womankind, instead of being hollow, rote terms used in to defend garbage late capitalist hyper-individualism.

I was an awkward teenager. I had a face full of acne and a raging libido I didn’t know what to do with and my period came every three weeks. I’d learned about the uterus shedding once a month in biology class, but my mom was embarrassed talking about such things with me and that was pretty much the extent of my knowledge of the female cycle. She took to her ob-gyn when I started high school, because that’s what mothers in the early 2000s in a wealthy Western country were supposed to do. The ob-gyn was a dour, tight-lipped woman who told me I was too chubby and said that the pill would help clear my acne.

The appointment lasted twenty minutes. She wrote me a prescription. I spent the next fifteen years renewing it.

Now that I think about it, it sounds madly irresponsible. I read the words I just wrote and I can hardly believe that adults would do such a thing. I didn’t even know how the pill really worked. Little pink and purple pamphlets about contraception, and later little pink and purple websites, all government issued, told me that it “blocked ovulation” and “regulated the menstrual cycle” because you always knew when you were getting your period.

“Period”. Of course no one said the blood from the synthetic hormone withdrawal simply mimicked your period. Of course no one said that your cycle wasn’t regulated, it simply ceased to exist altogether. We were soothed by this promise of predictability, of serenity, as if we had been saved from the hazards and dangers of womanhood with its chaotic cycles and blood gushing with clots and cramps and pregnancy scares. No, all was right now, we were on a sunny beach, looking out at the tumultuous waters our grandmothers had to navigate. We were the lucky ones: we’d booked a lifelong holiday on Wonder Woman’s island. We didn’t need to know our body anymore, because its natural function had been tamed and thus made irrelevant.

The acne did disappear, but along came headaches. Those weren’t too bad, at least not as bad as the anxiety. Perhaps I could blame it on the fact that I wasted my twenties dating a moron who refused to get married and kept saying, even when we hit thirty, that “children could wait a few more years”, but the fact is, my pill gave me no peace of mind. On the contrary, I was constantly paranoid about forgetting it and skipping a day. When I left home for work in the morning, I kept wondering if I had remembered to take it the night before, like one might wonder if they’ve switched off the gas. It got so bad that I finally resorted to carrying it around with me all day in my bag, just to be able to check or in case I got locked out of my own apartment.

The pill was a ball and chain. It’s impossible not to think about getting pregnant by accident when you have to swallow that little white tablet every single day. I suspect it wouldn’t have been the case if we’d simply used condoms, or if I had learned how my own damn body worked instead of treating it like a mysterious, unreliable creature that needed to be put to heel by doctors, because they were the only ones whose knowledge I could count on. I certainly couldn’t count on my own.

The cracks started to show shortly before my relationship imploded. (He cheated on me with a medical student, if you can believe it.) My libido had vanished entirely, and one might say that’s just what happens after a seven-year relationship, but I wasn’t lusting over anyone. Benedict Cumberbatch, my titular pretend husband, could have knocked on my door and propositioned me, and I would have simply shrugged that I was too tired from work. And I was tired, all the time. I felt like a slug, inside and out.

I asked my ob-gyn – a different one, as the dour lady had retired – if the pill had anything to do with the fact that I had no libido and low energy. BS, he told me. The pill was safe, the pill had no effect on fertility, or libido, or energy, or anything, not even after fifteen years of absolutely quashing the natural hormone levels and cycle of a healthy young woman whose only condition when she started taking it was pimples in her T-zone.

It was only when I was single again and finally got off it that the veil lifted. My libido magically returned and has not left me since, even though I’m 40, a mom, and ten years into my relationship with my real non-pretend husband. I rolled up my sleeves and started to educate myself on my cycles, knowing it would come in handy when I would try to get pregnant. Egg white, energy, chocolate cravings, crying for stupid shit, sore boobs, the basics are honestly not that hard and you build up from there. If I were president, I’d make the sympto-thermal method a mandatory course in high school; surely it’s not any more complicated than algebra.

I started to see cracks elsewhere. My sister’s husband wanted her to get off birth control because of what he’d read on women getting pulmonary embolisms. She had blood circulation issues and had to wear compression tights, and he thought it was irresponsible that her doctor would keep prescribing her the pill. “Condoms never killed anyone,” I once heard him say when they were discussing the topic.

Later, when my sister struggled with infertility and decided to resort to IVF, my mom confessed something to me as she prepared the Sunday roast in her kitchen.

“Maybe we messed up,” she said. “You hear it all the time, fertility rates going down… Maybe the fact that we took the pill had some sort of ill effect on the babies we had. If that’s the case, the doctors will never say so. They’ll cover it up.”

My mother is hardly a conspiracy theorist. She didn’t get that idea after going down a YouTube rabbit hole, she came up with it all by herself. True or not, it says something about how disempowered she felt, how little information she had been given, and how few questions she had asked, trusting that doctors knew what they were doing. And I believe doctors thought they knew what they were doing, but simply didn’t envision the long-term consequences it might have, both on a medical and on a social level, to alienate entire generations of women from their own bodies.

And now that some women are trying to explain to others how a cycle actually works and criticizing the birth control pill for its ill effects, it’s branded as misinformation in a major publication on the same level as believing that reptilian Illuminati overlords engineered Covid. One person interviewed by the Washington Post claims that “women frequently come in for abortions after believing what they see on social media about the dangers of hormonal birth control and the effectiveness of tracking periods to prevent pregnancy”.

I’d be curious to know how this man would explain the following. In 1976 in France, there were 34 abortions per 100 births; in 2022, there were 31.5 abortions per 100 births, amounting to a total of 216,378. That same year, statistics showed that 44% of women who use some form of birth control are on the pill. For women between 20 and 24 years old, that number is around 80%.

I’m not saying the pill isn’t effective in preventing unwanted pregnancy. I’m just saying that maybe we shouldn’t blame abortions on TikTok wellness coaches, since abortions don’t magically disappear, or even go down that much, when you prescribe the pill to basically anyone who asks for it. Perhaps instead of handing out hormone-altering medication like it’s candy, we should be teaching girls, as soon as they hit puberty, how their cycle actually works, symptoms and all, and what effect the pill has on it, simply because they have the right to know before they make a choice that might have long-term consequences on their health. Not only that, but if they go off the pill without knowing the first thing about an ovulation window, this is when unplanned pregnancy becomes a true risk.

This is exactly what Nicole Bendayan, whom the WaPo lambasted, is talking about when she uses the term “informed consent” in her videos. Discouraging girls and women from listening to their own body conveys the message that the body is a liar, and so your only solution is to muzzle it. This is not only false but dangerous.

There is no tragedy in my story, but I dearly wish someone had bothered to inform me when I was fifteen and pimply and naive. I wish I’d learned how to navigate the tumultuous waters instead of spending years stranded on the beach because I didn’t know how to swim. I am hopeful, however, that girls today might have a different course mapped out for them.