SOmering changes when it comes to contraception. Many people do not use it. Last week we heard that it included a third of the Irish children. Meanwhile, there was a significant increase in abortion in England and Wales. Contraceptive pill prescriptions in England dropped from 432,600 in 2014 to 188,500 in 2021. And this month data from abortion clinics found that demand was -filed by women who were dropping the pill and uses natural methods instead.
When the study compares the contraception used by women seeking abortion in 2018 and in 2023, it found that the proportion of using smartphones to monitor their menstrual cycle increased from 0.4% to 2.5% . The use of hormonal contraception in this group fell from 19% to 11%, while the group did not use any form of contraception when they were pregnant increased from 50% to 70%.
Why? When it comes to refusing the popularity of birth control control, two factors are played. One is a conservative backlash against it, beginning in America. Alex Clark, a pro-trump media personality, called the birth control pill “poison” and said it would cause “issues with fertility” later in life. She even suggested that it could “make the women wrong to feel bisexual” – claims that everything was not true. And conservative commentator Candace Owens criticized pill and intrauterine devices as “unnatural”. Elon Musk tweeted that hormonal birth control is “you make fat, double the risk of depression and triple risk of suicide”.
The collision with this is the healing movement, with the history of counseling people to treat themselves in “natural” rather than medically proven procedures. As media splinters, individual voices gain power to encourage. Videos on Tiktok and Instagram, many pill side-effects, gain millions of views. Then there are individual bad experiences that can get non -proportional attention, giving the impression that control control is more dangerous than this.
Public health leaders are trying to fight these forces – the NHS warns that misinformation about the pill on social media, especially a false claim that it causes loss, is killing women. But there is another, basic problem when it comes to contraception: it needs to be improved.
Many are dissatisfied with the contrasts we have. Bad information apart, condoms fail, IUDs are invading and can be painful to plant, hormone procedures have side-effects such as headache, weight loss, acne and depression. In women who take contraceptive pill, about a third stop in the first year, many are due to health concerns and concerns about side-effects.
The cultural battle with contraception is more focused on whether people should leave existing procedures, or if it is not responsible advice. But there is another question we should ask. Usually in women who use the same techniques as their mothers – or even their grandmothers. Why are the contraceptives not healed?
There is a definite appetite for new ideas. New products are often congratulated by excitement: when Lo Loestrin, a hormonal pill with lower estrogen, was introduced in 2011, it quickly became popular. But, strangely, it seems to have a bit of appetite for its development. The research centered on small improvement in existing contraceptives. There are only 20-25 funded by clinical trials in the industry between 2017 and 2020, compared to 600 for cardiovascular drugs in 2019 only. While pharmaceutical companies tend to plow 20% of their income on sales back to research and development, for contraception it is 2%. Funding is limited, forced by the public sector.
Why not do much jobs to improve contraceptives? Part of the problem is that when you provide medication to a healthy population, the safety requirements and trial risks are higher, which can relieve investors. Worldwide, the contraceptive market is still growing, despite its unpleasantness; Many women accept only trade-offs. This means that there is no large market signal need to change things.
But the history of contraception reflects the culture dramatically. While conservative forces try to push women to the pill by claiming to be dangerous, they are the quantymied research in the first place. Under this, too, is a hope that women will put significant effects. As long as contraceptives work, sadness is ignored or not released.
There is hope in reach. While women’s contraceptives have been stable, a new set of imaginative treatments is on the way – for men. One, for example, is a gel that works to block fertility when to -mear on the arms and shoulders, without affecting the mood or libido.
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While female side-effects are considered acceptable, as they are weighed against the dangers of pregnancy, researchers conducting trials do not think men will accept the same bargain. In 2011, a male contraceptive trial stopped when it appeared that the side-effects included mood swings and depression-it was usually experienced by women in the pill.
However, the advent of better contraception for men can make things easier for their female partners who do not like available options. Innovative ideas for men can also cross solutions for women, as the bar for safety and effectiveness is elevated.
There is also the risk, which, while male contraceptives absorb airtime and funding, women continue to fall: almost half of pregnancies around the world are unintentionally – a high proportion of them in places where control control is accessible. The need for change is urgent.
