Wellness crazies are telling women to ditch the pill. It’s lunacy

Ginger. Lemonade. Cinnamon. Thermometers. Eggwhites (kind of). I’ll tell you how to use them. You can thank me later.

There are a lot of whack jobs on TikTok. But here are the wackiest in what turns out to be a natural progression for the dangerous wellness lobby. These are the same kinds of people who campaign against vaccines. Who campaigned against masks. And now they have a new front. Fertility.

Graphic illustration by Stephen KiprillisCredit:

A bunch of young influencers are urging women not to use hormonal contraceptives. The pill. The IUDs with hormones embedded. These influencers promote what’s called hormone hesitancy. Some promote fertility tracking apps which cost money. Safe days. Ha. The most ludicrous idea ever.

They advise using natural methods to avoid getting pregnant. Like, don’t use the contraceptive pill because you are putting something unnatural in your body. The pill has side effects. It can make you put on weight. It can cause cancer. It can destroy your libido. It can make you moody. Sounds very, as the young people say, woo-woo.

This wellness advice is bad on so many levels, but let’s explain this part clearly – hormonal contraceptive methods stop you getting pregnant. If you don’t want to get pregnant, that’s a wonderful liberating thing. You could argue its invention was the single biggest contributor to women’s liberation, not just in this country but in the world.

I’d laugh at the various methods suggested (including ginger and lemonade and cinnamon) except it is genuinely frightening. Natural methods are hopeless at avoiding pregnancy. Every bit of research not funded by anti-contraception organisations will tell you that. Instead, natural methods are excellent at getting you pregnant. Why is that? The whole eggwhites thing (might be too much for your morning consumption, but google “vaginal mucus”) is fantastic if you want to get pregnant – as is taking your temperature to see if you are ovulating. Sperm might be sacred – but they are also canny. They hang around for much longer than you think they will. Keen as anything, the little tackers, to seed the next gen.

The use of period-tracking apps has led to an increased number of unwanted pregnancies. Credit: Stock

I asked Kirsten Black what she made of this trend. Black, a professor of sexual and reproductive health at the University of Sydney, says new research in the UK tells us how bad it’s getting. Among women presenting for abortion, there has been a nearly sixfold increase in the number of women using “fertility awareness” based contraceptive methods – and a reduction in the proportion of women using hormonal contraception by 40 per cent. These are just the numbers for the years between 2018 and 2023.

What happened at around the same time? An increase in the rates of abortion by nearly 20 per cent across the UK. Sadly, I can’t tell you if that’s happening here. We have pathetic and patchy records on rates of abortion, and each state and territory is different. We don’t have national abortion statistics. We don’t collect comprehensive contraception data. You don’t have to be a maths genius to know numbers matter.

Bonney Corbin, chair of the Australian Women’s Health Alliance, is clear. “We need a national confidential data collection and publication mechanism so we have some understanding of contraception and abortion in Australia,” she says. “We can’t improve practice without knowing what’s going on.”

So we don’t know what’s going on. But I can’t imagine we would be immune to the woo-woo therapy offered on TikTok.

And even the people at MSI Australia, a specialist provider of abortion and contraception services, are hearing echoes of TikTok.

MSI Australia’s medical director Philip Goldstone, who has worked in abortion and contraception care for more than 20 years, says: “We are concerned about the rise of contraception misinformation on TikTok. This misinformation risks undermining trust in reliable contraception methods and could lead to poorly informed choices when it comes to reproductive health.”

Goldstone says he has seen women come through MSI Australia clinics who cease or choose not to be on contraception, based on what they view on social media.

“It is their choice, but it is concerning how influential the misinformation is becoming,” he says.

So what does Black, who has worked in this area for 30 years, think about this campaign against hormonal contraceptives?

“Everything in life has advantages and disadvantages. Most women tolerate hormonal contraception well – and many women on the pill find their periods are lighter and often less painful,” she says.

Here’s the real deal, though. The risk of an unintended pregnancy using “natural” methods is up to three times higher than using the pill, says Black. And don’t you think our mothers and grandmothers would have told us how natural methods worked if they really did work?

Black tells me that much of what she has seen on this trend focuses on side effects, often with inaccurate claims. And yes, the pill can make you moody. Here’s what will make you even moodier.

Trying to get an abortion which doesn’t cost the earth. In NSW at least, a tiny handful of public hospitals provide access to abortion – and that’s only recently increased.

Says Black: “These methods are not reliable – in fact they are the least reliable. Depending on natural family planning to prevent pregnancies, particularly if you are young and don’t have regular cycles, places you at risk of an unintended pregnancy.”

The latest edition of British Medical Journal Sexual & Reproductive Health calls for newer forms of contraception which work for everyone – and suit everyone. I’m wondering if that includes a contraceptive for men.

As for ginger and lemonade and cinnamon, each is delicious in drinks. Thermometers are excellent in seeing if you have a fever or are actually ovulating (but they are not always accurate there either). As for eggwhites, try pavlovas.

Jenna Price is a regular columnist.

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