Does Quitting Birth Control Make Me a Bad Feminist?

 

This month, I stopped taking birth control. Not get pregnant but to feel alive again. 

As a troubled teen, my mother put me on the pill to ensure there were no “accidents” that would get between me and a college education. I would stay on the pill for ten continuous years and with a brief three-year stint off of it. 

In my most recent experience getting back on birth control, I went through four or five different prescriptions since each one left me more and more irritable than the last. My sex drive fell off a cliff and my experience of the world somehow felt….darker than it did during those three brief years without hormonal contraceptives. I feel less joy, less sadness, less awe. I feel like an automaton going through the motions of the day. 

And that’s why I decided to get off the pill. 

I want to feel the full spectrum of human experience again. I have one human life and one human body  to inhabit for a while and I want to experience it all - the painful, emotional, inconvenient parts of being human. 

In particular, I want to gain back what I feel like I lost - the absolutely overwhelming feelings of love for my partner, the upswell of tears and emotion at an especially beautiful sunset, the euphoric chattiness of an ovulation phase, the creative force that comes with the daily changes to my body and the way I feel. 

I long for the ever changing nature of being a woman, instead of the static day to day of a woman on birth control, where for one week every couple months there is bleeding but bleeding divorced from the feeling of a luteal crescendo and release into menstruation. I miss the energy of the follicular, the get up and go, the feeling of endless potential. I miss feeling like an animal, like a living thing. 

I traded all of that beautiful messiness for predictability, protection.

Though it never happened, I was terrified of getting pregnant and the anxiety was overwhelming - as if I’m not at the particular nexus of power that allows safe abortions to be within reach. 

Sex is risky no matter what method of contraceptive is used. For a long time, I was uncomfortable with that. 

I was tired of being afraid, and I thought going back on the pill would be the answer - that it would soothe my anxiety and make me feel safe. It was, for a time, but losing the texture of life lived from inside a soft animal body turned me into a living dead version of a human, walking through the world deadened and dulled to the true experience of it. 

I recognize that my choice to go off birth control is not one made in a vacuum, and that there are forces much larger than myself trying to convince more women to stop all evidence-based contraception. Typically this is in service of a vision of the world where women are without rights, barefoot and pregnant, and men rule the public and private domains.  

I have big problems with choice feminism, where every choice a woman makes is feminist because a woman is the one making it. That logic permits women to serve as the handmaidens of the patriarchy and cause real harm with impunity, based purely on the fact they are women. If everything is feminist, then nothing is feminist. 

Choice feminism has become an unfortunate mainstay of third wave feminism, a misguided response to the accusations that feminism is too radical, too exclusionary. Instead, choice feminism takes the focus off structures and systems and places it on the autonomy of individual, usually privileged, women. 

I also recognize that by giving up birth control I am giving up a technology that revolutionized women’s lives by allowing them for the first time in human history to reliably decide when, how many, how frequently, and with whom to have children. Women no longer needed to rely on fraught negotiations with men about consent or condom use or pulling out in order to prevent pregnancy. 

The Pill gained FDA approval during a time when women weren’t even allowed to sign up for their own credit cards or to buy property without a man’s consent - that is coverture. 

And here I am, deciding that I don’t want to take this pill anymore because I don’t like how it makes me feel. 

It feels like I am spitting in Margret Sanger’s face.

Simultaneously, contraceptives have been used as a tool of eugenics. Black and Brown women in particular have been coerced into getting long acting reversible contraception like IUDs. But when they wanted to have those same IUDs removed, they were denied or were quoted an unreasonably high cost - nonsurgical forced sterilization. 

These days, when there are plenty of alt-right, very white wellness grifters touting “cycle syncing” and “natural birth control” as reasonable alternatives to the pill and calling oral hormonal contraceptives “toxic”, I feel like my personal choice carries much more weight. 

These women influencers are pink pilled - in that they are using their platforms to function as the handmaidens of fascism, posting seemingly innocent content about their pregnancies, their children, their wellness routines - but those images of homemade sourdough, plates of fruit, milkmaid dresses, and happy children are propaganda. 

This is all part of Project 2025, a document which lays out the game plan to limit access to contraceptives. This is their plan:  

• Use misinformation and anti-science rhetoric to guide decision making regarding clinical recommendations (just like they did for vaccines)
• Eliminate certain types of birth control from the ACA birth control benefit, like condoms and the morning after pill
• Allow employers to opt out of providing birth control coverage for any reason
• Eliminate sexual education in favor of classes about the importance of family and marriage 

The pink pilled tradwives touting natural birth control and hormone balancing foods are just manufacturing your consent to have this plan carried out. 

And they’ve made (some of) it convincing.

Like many other wellness grifts, the demonization of birth control plays on the fact that there is so little research about women’s health concerns. There’s a lot we don’t know, and what women have experienced in the biomedical health system has left us traumatized, minimized, unheard, and undertreated. This lack of trust is part of why so many women turn to the woo woo wellness fads (and even things like antivaccination) in the first place. 

This is Naomi Klein’s Mirror World, Contraceptives Edition. 

The Mirror World is how Klein described the seemingly alternate reality inhabited by Naomi Wolfe, one time feminist icon and now alt right grifter. The Mirror World is where the Right has taken to  “mimicking beliefs and concerns that feed off progressive failures and silences” in order to bring in acolytes and, most importantly, voters. It’s a world that is familiar but not, where the concerns expressed are correct in some ways, but the explanation is insane. 

The Right has used the concerns about pesticide pollution to claim that tap water is feminizing male infants and making the frogs gay; concerns about Big Pharma (who did start the opioid crisis) are used to foment COVID vaccine skepticism; concerns about Big Tech has led to the proliferation of an entire ecosystem of conservative social media apps funded by dark money instead of passing common sense digital data privacy laws. 

The pink pilled fascists have twisted the concerns many women have regarding our treatment in the medical system and are using it to push a pro-natalist, fascist agenda. They are using concerns about the lack of research on women’s bodies to assert that actually women are too weak to work in male dominated fields; that a lack of informed consent regarding side effects of long term use of hormonal contraceptive means there’s something to hide; that women should stay home and not work in order to keep their hormones balanced. 

Have I been influenced? I don’t pretend to be immune from the political propaganda that is served to me via algorithm. I often am able to identify it as such, but there’s always things that slip through.

I certainly don’t believe that cycle tracking is going to prevent pregnancy or that hormonal contraceptives are “toxic”. They have been the tool of liberation for many women, an essential healthcare treatment, and have allowed us to make incredible strides in education and science and art and to gain real political power. They want to take that away from us - and by “they” I mean the techno fascist broligarchs like arch-weirdo Peter Thiel, who want a society where women are at home and under the complete control of their husbands. 

I just feel very tormented by this decision and feel like I’m being a good feminist by giving up on the technology that allowed generations of women to break free of forced birth or to function while suffering from a largely incurable medical condition like PCOS or endometriosis. I hate to think that maybe I’m being influenced by the pink pilled fascists who think that women’s role is subservience and reproduction, and my anatomy is what makes me destined for second class citizenship. 

Living in this era of history, every choice I make about my body feels incredibly fraught. There’s certainly fear on my part that there will be a time where there isn’t a choice to be made at all, because reproductive healthcare, including contraceptives and abortion, will be out of our hands. The assault on women’s rights is ongoing, from our voting rights, to our rights to have a miscarriage without criminal prosecution. 

So I’ll ask again, am I being a bad feminist?