The Birth Control Deception: What 60 Years of Lies Cost Women

31st July 2025
First published on Unbekoming

An Essay – Plus Questions to Ask a Doctor

The Experiment Begins

In 1960, when the FDA approved the first birth control pill, pharmaceutical companies were providing teaching materials directly to sex education programs across America. By 1970, teenage pregnancy rates were 68 per 1,000. After just one decade of classroom-based sex education promoting contraception, that number skyrocketed to 96 per 1,000. As Candace Owens exposed in her Shot in the Dark series, this was no accident—pharmaceutical companies saw schools as hosting ‘a captive audience of more than 40 million school children. This wasn’t the liberation we were promised—it was the beginning of one of the most successful social engineering projects in human history.

The narrative we’ve inherited about birth control reads like a fairy tale: Margaret Sanger and Katharine McCormick, crusading for women’s freedom, funded the development of a “magic pill” that would liberate women from the burden of unwanted pregnancies. Finally, we’re told, women could pursue education and careers without fear. But the real story, buried in government documents and foundation archives, tells a different tale. The Rockefeller family, who had funded eugenics programs since the 1920s, poured millions into birth control research. By 1974, Henry Kissinger’s National Security Study Memorandum 200 explicitly identified population growth in developing nations as a threat to U.S. resources, recommending the promotion of contraception and the elevation of women’s status—not for women’s benefit, but to reduce birth rates.

Today, one in four women taking hormonal contraceptives is prescribed antidepressants. Women on the pill face double the risk of suicide attempts and triple the risk of completed suicide compared to those who never used hormonal contraception. These aren’t fringe findings from questionable sources—they’re the results of massive studies involving hundreds of thousands of women, published in leading medical journals. Yet how many women are informed of these risks when handed that first prescription at thirteen, fifteen, or eighteen years old?

The birth control pill promised to separate sex from reproduction, but it has accomplished something far more profound: it has separated women from their own bodies, their natural cycles, and increasingly, from the very possibility of motherhood. What began as a tool for family planning has become a requirement for participation in modern life, prescribed to girls barely into their teens for everything from acne to painful periods, creating a generation of women who spend their most fertile years chemically sterile, only to discover when they finally want children that their window has closed.

This essay will take you on a journey through the hidden history of hormonal contraception—from its eugenicist origins to its current role in what some researchers now call “unplanned childlessness.” We’ll examine how birth control became embedded in our education system through shock tactics and peer pressure documented in Department of Education hearings. We’ll explore the mounting evidence linking the pill to depression, anxiety, and even changes in partner selection that may be contributing to our epidemic of divorce. And we’ll confront the uncomfortable truth about how the pharmaceutical industry, government agencies, and even feminist organizations have worked together to normalize the daily consumption of synthetic hormones by healthy young women.

But this isn’t just a story about the past. It’s about the present reality facing millions of women who are only now beginning to question why they feel angry on the pill, why their libido vanishes, why they’re attracted to different types of men when taking hormones versus not. It’s about young women today who are taught that their natural fertility is a disease to be treated, their periods a monthly curse to be suppressed, their ability to create life an inconvenience to be managed. Most urgently, it’s about ensuring that the next generation of women can make truly informed choices about their bodies, their health, and their futures.

The Architects of Control

The story of birth control begins not with women’s liberation, but with population control. In the early 1900s, Margaret Sanger partnered with eugenicists who saw contraception as a tool for reducing “undesirable” populations. The Rockefeller Foundation, which had donated over $400,000 to eugenics research by 1926 (nearly $7 million in today’s dollars), became a major funder of Sanger’s work. These weren’t progressive heroes fighting for women’s rights—they were social engineers with a vision for reshaping humanity itself.

The most damning evidence comes from recently declassified government documents. In 1974, at the height of the women’s liberation movement, Henry Kissinger authored National Security Study Memorandum 200, which became official U.S. policy under President Ford. This document explicitly stated that population growth in developing countries threatened U.S. access to minerals and resources. Among its recommendations: promoting women’s education and workforce participation, not as goods in themselves, but as the most effective means of preventing births. The memo identified thirteen nations for targeted population reduction, recommending that efforts be disguised to avoid appearing as “a form of economic or racial imperialism.”

John D. Rockefeller III, who founded the Population Council in 1952, pushed this agenda even further. The Population Council promoted contraception worldwide, but internal documents reveal their true motivation wasn’t women’s health but resource control. As I’ve noted, “The oligarchs understood what took feminists decades to admit: educated, working women have fewer children.” The alignment was perfect—population controllers wanted fewer births, corporations wanted cheap female labor, and feminists wanted women in the workforce. The birth control pill became the tool that satisfied all three agendas while being marketed solely as female liberation.

Manufacturing Consent in the Classroom

By the 1970s, with the birth control pill approved and the Department of Education newly established, the campaign to normalize hormonal contraception moved into schools. What happened next, documented in congressional hearings and exposed by economist Thomas Sowell, whose work Candace Owens extensively explores in her Shot in the Dark investigation, reveals a systematic program of psychological manipulation that would make Madison Avenue jealous. Sex education wasn’t introduced because teenagers were having more sex—in fact, teen pregnancy was declining before these programs began. As late as 1987, only half of all 18-year-olds had engaged in premarital sex.

The tactics used to reshape young minds followed classic brainwashing techniques. Teachers would shock students with graphic content—forcing them to watch childbirth videos or demonstrations with anatomical models. They isolated those with traditional values through peer pressure, asking classes to vote on whether premarital sex was acceptable and humiliating those who disagreed. One documented case involved a teacher calling on a student named John up to 23 times per class to defend his belief that sex should wait for marriage, while orchestrating his classmates to argue against him. The message was clear: traditional values were abnormal, backward, and shameful.

Most insidiously, pharmaceutical companies were directly involved in creating these curricula. As Candace Owens discovered through Thomas Sowell’s research, these companies viewed schools as having ‘a captive audience of more than 40 million school children. They provided “educational materials” promoting their products to captive audiences of millions of schoolchildren. Teachers were sent on retreats and conferences funded by these same companies, returning with lesson plans that normalized daily hormone use for teenage girls. By 1979, the U.S. Department of Health was distributing questionnaires asking children about their masturbation habits and sexual activities—not to gather health data, but to desensitize them to sexual content and make birth control seem like a natural, necessary part of growing up.

The Chemical Revolution in Women’s Bodies

What exactly happens when a young woman starts taking birth control? The pill works by tricking the body into believing it’s already pregnant, flooding it with synthetic hormones that shut down natural ovulation. But the effects go far beyond preventing pregnancy. Research shows that hormonal contraceptives fundamentally alter brain chemistry, affecting everything from mood to memory to mate selection. Women on the pill show altered stress responses, with their bodies producing different amounts of cortisol—the stress hormone—compared to naturally cycling women.

The psychological effects are staggering. A massive Danish study tracking nearly half a million women found that those on hormonal contraceptives had a 70% higher risk of depression compared to non-users. For teenagers, the risk was even higher—adolescent girls on the pill were 80% more likely to be prescribed antidepressants. But depression is just the beginning. The same researchers found that pill users had double the risk of suicide attempts and triple the risk of completed suicide. The risk was highest in the first two months of use—exactly when many young women are most vulnerable and least likely to connect their emotional changes to their new prescription.

Perhaps most disturbing are the effects on partner selection. Multiple studies have confirmed that women on the pill are attracted to different types of men than when they’re cycling naturally. The pill reverses normal mate preferences, causing women to prefer men with similar immune system markers—the opposite of natural attraction, which drives us toward genetic diversity. Women who meet their partners while on the pill often experience a shocking change in attraction when they stop taking it. As one researcher noted, “We’re conducting a massive experiment on human bonding, and we have no idea what the long-term consequences will be.”

The Fertility Trap

The cruel irony of birth control is that it often prevents women from having the children they eventually desperately want. Women are told they can delay childbearing indefinitely, that fertility is simply a switch they can flip on when ready. But the reality is starkly different. Female fertility begins declining at 27, more sharply after 30, and dramatically after 35. Yet the average age of first birth has been pushed later and later, with many women not attempting pregnancy until their thirties or even forties. The result is an epidemic of what researchers call “unplanned childlessness”—women who always intended to have children but aged out of their fertility window while building careers or waiting for stability.

The documentary “Birthgap” reveals the shocking scope of this crisis. In countries with ultra-low fertility rates, one-third or more of women remain childless—but not by choice. Studies show that only 10% of childless women actively chose that path; another 10% have medical issues, while a staggering 80% are childless due to circumstances. They delayed too long, couldn’t find partners, or discovered fertility problems when they finally tried to conceive. In Japan, childlessness rose from 6% of women in 1974 to one in three by 1990. The pattern repeats across developed nations, creating what researchers call the “birth gap”—shrinking cohorts of young people who will somehow need to support massive aging populations.

Making matters worse, we’re poisoning the very biological systems that govern fertility. Endocrine-disrupting chemicals are everywhere—BPA in plastics, phthalates in cosmetics, pesticides in food, fluoride in water. These chemicals interfere with the delicate hormonal dance required for conception and healthy pregnancy. The birth control pill adds another layer of disruption, suppressing natural hormone production for years or decades. When women finally stop the pill to try for pregnancy, their bodies may struggle to resume normal cycling. Some never fully recover their natural fertility, joining the ranks of the involuntarily childless who bought into the myth that reproduction could be scheduled like a business meeting.

The Hidden Cancer Connection

While women are warned about the pill’s minor side effects—weight gain, mood changes, spotting—the cancer risks are rarely discussed with the gravity they deserve. The science is clear but uncomfortable: women who use oral contraceptives have a 24% increased risk of breast cancer while taking them. The risk is highest for those who start young and use them long-term. For women with a family history of breast or ovarian cancer, one study found the risk could be up to 11 times higher. Yet how many teenage girls prescribed the pill for acne are informed they’re potentially trading clear skin for increased cancer risk?

The cancer connection creates a cruel calculus. Yes, the pill reduces the risk of ovarian and endometrial cancers—a fact pharmaceutical companies eagerly promote. Women on the pill have 30-50% lower risk of ovarian cancer and at least 30% lower risk of endometrial cancer. But this protection must be weighed against the increased risk of breast and cervical cancers. For young women with no family history of reproductive cancers, starting the pill as teenagers for non-contraceptive reasons means accepting breast cancer risk during their prime years for protection against cancers that typically strike much later in life.

The research on this trade-off is particularly damning when you consider how the pill is marketed and prescribed. Doctors routinely prescribe hormonal contraceptives to girls as young as 13 for acne, cramps, or “cycle regulation”—conditions that often resolve naturally with age. These girls then spend their teens and twenties, when breast tissue is most vulnerable to carcinogenic influences, bathed in synthetic hormones. By the time they’re informed enough to weigh cancer risks, they’ve already had decades of exposure. It’s a medical experiment conducted on millions of young women who were never fully informed they were participants.

The Feminist Paradox

The birth control pill’s relationship with feminism represents one of history’s great ironies. Sold as the key to women’s liberation, it instead became what Marxist feminist Nancy Fraser admits was “capitalism’s handmaiden.” The pill enabled the destruction of the family wage—where one income could support a household—by flooding the labor market with women. When you double the workforce, you halve its value. What was sold as the choice to work became the necessity to work, with families now requiring two incomes to achieve what one provided in the 1960s.

The feminist movement’s embrace of the pill aligned perfectly with corporate interests in suppressing wages and government interests in population control. As researcher Janice Fiamengo documents, feminism “delivered exactly what it claimed to oppose: women reduced to their economic function, valued only for productivity, their worth measured in GDP contribution rather than human connection.” The pill didn’t free women from biology—it chained them to a different master, trading the rhythms of their own bodies for the demands of corporate schedules that never pause for fertility, pregnancy, or nursing.

Most perversely, modern feminism has taught women to view their own bodies as the enemy. Natural fertility is reframed as a burden, periods as a curse, the ability to create life as an inconvenience to be chemically suppressed. Young women learn to fear their own biology while embracing synthetic hormones that disconnect them from their natural cycles. The same movement that claims to empower women has convinced them that their greatest power—the ability to create and nurture life—is actually their greatest weakness. This isn’t liberation; it’s the internalization of a profoundly anti-woman ideology that benefits everyone except women themselves.

The Assault on Female Biology

Beyond the pill itself lies a broader chemical assault on women’s fertility that researchers are only beginning to understand. We live in what some scientists call an “endocrine-disrupting soup”—surrounded by chemicals that interfere with our hormonal systems. BPA in plastics mimics estrogen in the body. Phthalates in personal care products disrupt hormone production. Pesticides like atrazine feminize male frogs and may be having similar effects on humans. Fluoride in drinking water affects thyroid function, which is crucial for fertility. These chemicals are everywhere—in our food packaging, cosmetics, cleaning products, and water supply.

The birth control pill adds another layer to this toxic burden. While women’s bodies are already struggling to maintain hormonal balance in a poisoned environment, we add daily doses of synthetic hormones that shut down natural cycling. The combination may be catastrophic for long-term fertility. Some researchers theorize that the rising rates of PCOS, endometriosis, and unexplained infertility are linked to this chemical assault on the endocrine system. Women who’ve been on the pill since their teens, living in urban environments full of endocrine disruptors, eating processed foods wrapped in plastic, may find their bodies unable to conceive when they finally try.

Even more troubling is evidence that these chemicals may be damaging the maternal instinct itself. The complex hormonal cascade that creates the drive to nurture and protect offspring can be disrupted by endocrine-interfering chemicals. Oxytocin, the bonding hormone; prolactin, which promotes nurturing behaviors; the intricate dance of estrogen and progesterone that prepares a woman’s body and mind for motherhood—all can be affected by chemical exposure. We may be creating a generation of women whose bodies are not only less capable of bearing children but whose brains are less primed to want them in the first place.

Personal experience confirms what the research suggests. Candace Owens, who investigated birth control’s history in her Shot in the Dark series, declined the pill throughout her life despite persistent pressure from doctors starting in her teens. ‘I do think that a huge reason that I have been so fertile and I haven’t had any issues with fertility, is because I always declined birth control,’ she explains. Her brief experiment with the pill ended abruptly when it made her ‘particularly angry’ to the point of wanting to ‘physically assault’ her boyfriend. ‘I did not like that feeling of being an angry person and a crazy person,’ she recalls. Her story echoes millions of women who’ve discovered that the pill fundamentally altered their personalities—yet another side effect rarely discussed in doctor’s offices.

The Male Crisis Hidden in Plain Sight

While we focus on women’s experiences with birth control, we’ve ignored how the pill fundamentally altered relationships between the sexes. The promise was that reliable contraception would improve marriages by removing the fear of unwanted pregnancy. Instead, we’ve seen marriage rates plummet, divorce rates soar, and a growing mutual hostility between men and women. The pill didn’t just change women’s bodies—it changed the entire sexual marketplace in ways that have left both sexes miserable.

Men, told that women’s universal availability was liberation, instead found themselves deemed unnecessary beyond their function as sperm donors. The “hookup culture” enabled by the pill benefits only a small percentage of high-status men while leaving the majority of both sexes lonely and disconnected. Young men increasingly withdraw from dating entirely, viewing relationships as too risky in an environment where natural male sexuality is pathologized while consequence-free female sexuality is celebrated. The birth control pill created a world where sex is everywhere but intimacy is increasingly rare.

Meanwhile, women on the pill report lower sexual satisfaction, decreased libido, and difficulty achieving orgasm—cruel ironies for a medication that was supposed to enhance sexual freedom. Many women discover that the pill hasn’t freed them for better sex but has numbed them to sexual pleasure entirely. They spend their twenties chemically neutered, then wonder why their relationships lack passion. When they finally go off the pill, often to try for pregnancy, they may discover they’re no longer attracted to their partners—or that years of suppressed sexuality can’t simply be switched back on.

Breaking the Spell

The first step to reclaiming our health and fertility is recognizing that we’ve been sold a lie. The birth control pill wasn’t developed for women’s benefit but for population control. It wasn’t tested adequately for long-term safety but rushed to market to serve ideological and economic agendas. The education system that normalized it used documented manipulation tactics to overcome our natural resistance to daily hormone consumption. Young women aren’t given informed consent—they’re given one-sided propaganda that ignores serious risks while exaggerating benefits.

True informed consent would require doctors to explain that the pill doubles suicide risk, that it may permanently alter brain chemistry, that it could affect future fertility, that it changes who women are attracted to, that it increases some cancer risks while decreasing others. It would require acknowledging that we don’t fully understand the long-term consequences of suppressing natural hormonal cycles for decades. It would mean admitting that many women prescribed the pill for acne or cramps are taking on serious health risks for conditions that might resolve naturally or be treated with less dangerous interventions.

Most importantly, breaking the spell means recognizing that our bodies aren’t broken. Painful periods, acne, PMS—these aren’t diseases requiring lifelong pharmaceutical intervention but often symptoms of underlying imbalances that can be addressed through nutrition, lifestyle changes, and treating our bodies with respect rather than as inconveniences to be chemically controlled. We need to rediscover what health looks like without synthetic hormones, what natural cycles feel like, what it means to be fully present in our female bodies rather than numbed to their rhythms.

The Path Forward

So where do we go from here? First, we must demand truly informed consent. Every woman considering hormonal contraception deserves to know the full range of risks—not just the mild side effects but the serious psychological and physical consequences documented in peer-reviewed research. We need doctors who will take women’s concerns seriously rather than dismissing pill-induced depression or anxiety as unrelated to medication. We need education that presents all options, including fertility awareness methods that work with our bodies rather than against them.

Second, we must address the broader assault on fertility. This means pushing for stricter regulation of endocrine-disrupting chemicals, supporting organic agriculture that doesn’t poison our food supply, and creating awareness about environmental toxins that affect reproductive health. It means questioning why fertility problems are treated as individual medical issues rather than recognizing them as symptoms of a poisoned environment and a toxic culture that has taught women to delay childbearing past their biological prime.

Finally, we must reclaim the narrative around women’s bodies and fertility. Being able to create life isn’t a burden to be suppressed but a profound power that connects us to the continuous chain of humanity. Women’s cycles aren’t inconveniences but sources of insight, creativity, and connection to natural rhythms. Motherhood isn’t a career-limiting detour but for many women the most meaningful work they’ll ever do. This doesn’t mean every woman must have children, but it does mean recognizing that a woman’s capacity for creation is a gift, not a curse.

The Reckoning

We stand at a crossroads. The generation raised on birth control from adolescence is now facing an epidemic of infertility, depression, and broken relationships. The promised liberation has delivered bondage to pharmaceutical companies, wage slavery in corporate jobs, and disconnection from our own bodies. The sexual revolution has produced not freedom but loneliness, not empowerment but dependence on antidepressants and anxiety medications to cope with the fallout of disrupted hormones and destroyed pair bonds.

But awareness is growing. Women are sharing their stories of pill-induced personality changes, of relationships destroyed when they stopped taking hormones, of years lost to depression they didn’t realize was iatrogenic. Young women are questioning why they should take cancer risks for clearer skin, why they should shut down their fertility to participate in an economy that demands they work like men while denying the realities of female biology. Parents are asking why their thirteen-year-old daughters are being prescribed powerful hormones for normal adolescent experiences.

The truth about birth control—its eugenic origins, its role in wage suppression, its devastating health effects, its part in creating our fertility crisis—can no longer be hidden. What remains to be seen is whether we’ll have the courage to act on this knowledge. Will we continue sacrificing our daughters’ health and fertility to maintain a system that benefits everyone but women themselves? Or will we reclaim our bodies, our cycles, and our power to create life on our own terms? The choice is ours, but first, we must ensure every woman has the information to make it freely. The age of uninformed consent must end. Our bodies, our futures, and our children depend on it.

Essential Questions to Ask When a Doctor Recommends Birth Control Pills

Red Flag Responces

“It’s completely safe”
“Everyone takes it”
“Those risks are overblown”
“You’re overthinking this”

Remember: You can always refuse, get a second opinion, or ask for time to research. Any doctor who pressures you is not practicing informed consent.