Charlotte Freed first got a hormonal IUD when she was 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 a friend of hers quit her birth control, and recommended a book on the topic, that Freed started wondering if the two could be related.
"It was really upsetting and almost like a little disturbing that no doctor had ever brought it up," said Freed, now 27.
At that point, Freed had had an IUD for about eight years.
"I kind of just [wanted] to, like, meet myself in a way that I hadn't since I was 16, 17," she said. "And, you know, maybe I would experience some changes in my mental, emotional, physical well-being that I didn't even really know were a possibility."
So Freed took out her IUD. Social media is full of stories from 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.
They worry that some women may be making key decisions about family planning based on those dubious claims, which could lead to unintended pregnancies and create more confusion around the drugs.
Dr. Jennifer Lincoln tries to combat that misinformation. She's an OBGYN based in Portland, Ore. who makes videos debunking common myths that circulate online.
Myths like: "'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," Lincoln said.
"And what makes me really sad is that there's so many people who go to TikTok for like — that's their Google search now."
A 2024 study analyzed posts about birth control on TikTok, and found that nearly half of posts on the topic were discouraging women from taking it.
Skepticism drives social media content
Conservative podcast host Alex Clark urges her listeners to reconsider hormonal birth control, which she says is overprescribed, and calls it a band-aid that can mask more serious underlying issues, like endometriosis and polycystic ovary syndrome, which can affect fertility long term.
"I feel like women haven't been given true informed consent when it comes to the hormonal birth control pill," Clark said. "I don't think that they're being told that hormonal birth control isn't going to actually cure or solve any hormonal issues or women's health issues. It helps suppress symptoms, but that doesn't mean that it's actually curing anything."
Clark took the pill for nearly 10 years before stopping. Now she steers her listeners toward non-hormonal options like condoms and cycle tracking, which tend to have higher failure rates.
"I think if women were told the truth about hormonal birth control in general, that they would choose other options," Clark said. "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."
Dr. Jennifer Lincoln believes her colleagues should do more to explain the facts around birth control. She said social media is filling a vacuum that gets created when doctors rush their patients through appointments or brush off concerns about symptoms.
"The medical field owns so much of why people are going to these forums and Reddit and Tik-Tok for information and are really buying it because…we have failed them," Lincoln said. "We have either brushed off their concerns – I mean, you could spend all day just talking about how so many women's issues do not get adequately funded or addressed – but we know that oftentimes they might be met with, 'that's not a real side effect.' We have a huge role in this."
Freed said she doesn't feel like she had all the information needed to make an informed decision about her birth control as a teenager. Her high school health class, she said, spent one day on "sex ed," and she was sick that day and missed the lesson. And her doctors had no answers to her questions about whether her IUD could be affecting her mood.
"When asking about side effects, it would just be that, 'You know, there's a possibility that your period goes away. And there's a possibility that you get ovarian cysts' — these types of things that are easier to track," she said. "It's not malicious, but it's just connected to the fact that women are under-researched in the health field."
Dr. Wanda Ronner is a professor of clinical obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine. She said the medical field has become more "corporatized" in a way that makes it harder for doctors to give patients the information they need.
"You get your 10 minutes and that's it," Ronner said. "And, you know, the back end explanations are coming from maybe the physician's nurse – If you have a good nurse, that will spend time with the patient explaining things, calling them, or even doing it through the portal. I think it's a very frustrating landscape for young people because they have so much information [available to them on the internet]. And who do you listen to? You know, who do you go to?"
A "lose-lose situation" for women
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 — though she said she'll never really know if it was "correlation or causation." She said stopping birth control gave her more information about her body at a "baseline level"
But then, Freed was going abroad for graduate school, and she couldn't take the risk of getting pregnant in a foreign country. She considered getting a copper IUD — which does not contain hormones — but was worried about the physical side effects that method can cause.
"Thing that sucks about being a woman is like – either the trade off is, you know, the possibility of having a child when you don't want to, the possibility of like hormones kind of messing up your personality or, you know, giving increasing anxiety, depression, fatigue, whatever, or, having horrible cramps and bleeding for 12 days straight," she said. "So it really is just like, it's a lose-lose situation."
Ultimately, Freed got a new hormonal IUD put in. But she's considering taking another break.
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