How Conservatives Ban Birth Control
And why you are seeing so much anti-birth control content on social media
Today’s post is a collab with my friend
. Her new book, Everyone is Lying to You, is the influencer tradwife murder mystery you need for your summer beach read. (especially after reading this article!) Pre-order your copy now - I’m sure it will sell out!! (Bookshop, Amazon)This week Evie magazine launched a new campaign: Ditch the Pill.
If you aren’t familiar with Evie, they are the ‘Cosmo for conservatives’ digital mag that is most famous for publishing a cover of Hannah Neelman from Ballerina Farm in a milkmaid dress. This week they made a series of IG posts announcing “Ditch the Pill Day” and glorifying the celebrities who have gone off birth control. This isn’t new content for them, but it is an escalation. The founder of Evie also started a natural cycle-tracking app, backed by Peter Thiel the billionaire backer of both Trump and Vance.
The pill doesn’t work for everyone. Plenty of people, the both of us included, don’t enjoy being on it. We need more research into women’s health, period. But the pill is also an incredibly effective tool to allow women to decide when and how to get pregnant and to maintain control over their lives. It’s also used by people to treat all types of medical ailments and aid in fertility treatments. When Emily was in her dying era last year she had to go on the pill for a month when her body stopped making all types of hormones. And despite some of the side effects, Jo used the pill for decades to make sure she could carve out the kind of professional and personal life she wanted before she settled down, got married and had her three children. The pill gave her options and let her have both a career and a family.
Pregnancy, it’s always important to note, can have tremendous medical side effects. Especially in a time where access to abortion is increasingly difficult.
But those kinds of nuanced conversations are not being had in Evie’s coverage. Hormonal birth control is demonized by pseudo-science that includes things as ridiculous as the idea that hormonal birth control will make women more attracted to “less masculine men.”
So what is actually behind this? These posts don’t exist in a vacuum. It is content put out by a political magazine that is connected to a policy strategy. Evie’s anti-birth control campaign is a Trojan Horse for pushing pronatalist policies on young women and convincing them to check out of the reproductive rights fight. Evie is not alone in this, Turning Point USA has been putting out anti-birth control media for years via Alex Clark, who creates content like, “ GIRL TALK: Why Women (And I!) Are Ditching Birth Control.” Her brand sweatshirts from 2021 said “Birth Control? Ew.” In 2023 she said that the most important thing about Turning Point’s Young Women’s Leadership Summit was that she convinced women to go off birth control.
EJ Dickson reported that birth control was (yet again) an important topic at last weekend’s Young Women’s Leadership Summit.
Jo talked to EJ for her Under the Influence podcast this week and went behind the scenes of the conference. (There will be a lot more reporting here about the conference next week.)
Evie has been highlighting celebrities who go off birth control for a while - the point is to use anecdata to create the specter of a cultural movement, to convince young women that the side effects of birth control make it not worth using. And the misinformation is working. A survey from Power to Decide found that 39% of women 18-24 worry that using birth control could affect their ability to have a baby later in life. (there is no scientific evidence of this.) As a contrary anecdata Jo used birth control for most of her adult life and had babies at ages 37, 39 and 42.
There is a culture war being waged to shift women away from wanting access to birth control for themselves and others and it has serious real world consequences. When birth control stops being something that young women believe they deserve to have access to it becomes much easier for the government to restrict it and eventually ban it. Here is how they can do it: