Your article on contraception misinformation does not consider the long history of medical misogyny (Online misinformation putting women off contraceptive pill, study finds, 13 September). I am a PhD researcher studying the cultural discourse on contraception. I’m also a young woman within the age range and online culture that you talk about, and within my work I explore this space critically.
Effectively, it is wrong to assume a value-neutral background when researching attitudes to contraception, a medical technology that is only available to us now through historical injustices enacted upon women, especially women of colour.
During the development of the pill, researchers coercively tested it on women in Puerto Rico, who were not informed of the experimental nature of the medicine. Despite many of them reporting serious side-effects, the researchers declared the pill 100% effective, and dismissed the patients’ symptoms as psychosomatic, due to the “emotional super-activity of Puerto Rican women”. This rhetoric has unfortunately endured across the decades, with women’s reporting of real side-effects routinely blamed on “hysteria” or emotional suggestibility.
Birth control users today are harnessing social media to raise awareness about these issues, just like women’s health activists of previous generations; and as in previous generations, this has a tendency to include some misinformation, since it operates outside of rigorous research.
However, the onus is on medical practitioners to develop better birth control methods, rather than trying to quash concerns about the pill. A legacy of medical gaslighting, trauma and violence runs through women’s medicine.
Rebecca Siddall
Cambridge
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