Survey: Why French women are quitting “The Pill”

Full Disclosure: I am a man. Article is by a French woman radio host who conducted the survey..

Leaving aside other issues for the moment, I've always wondered why taking a hormone, that effects (as all hormones really do) your whole body, is considered a good idea. so maybe it's not a good idea?

Increasingly women in France (my homeland) are dropping the contraceptive pill and avoiding hormonal contraceptives in general. In a HuffPost article, independent journalist and French public radio host Sabrina Debusquat explains that she conducted a survey of 3,616 French women who had taken the pill and found out why 91 percent had stopped at least one time. After she published the results, the media and medical professionals responded by calling women’s reluctance a “defiance” toward the pill, suggesting that women are misled, mistaken, and guided by fear rather than reason. “When we ask them, we realize that the reality is very different,” writes Ms. Debusquat. Here are women’s main reasons for dropping the pill, as she reports them.

The top reason why women quit the pill is “side effects that are [considered] benign but problematic.” Among the respondents of the survey, 70 percent reported they experienced side effects and the full report reveals how serious and endemic these problems are: 69.6 percent reported a loss of libido, 53.6 percent weight gain, 51.9 percent mood disorders (blues, depression, irritability), 36 percent migraines, 34.2 percent vaginal dryness.

These are typical side-effects that doctors will try to correct by changing a prescription, but tend to consider a minor and acceptable part of being on contraceptives. French women are no longer OK with that. Ms Debusquat calls modern women the “no-pill generation” and writes, “they consider that beyond the risks of cancer or blood clots, experiencing reduced libido, migraines, repetitive vaginal infections and any pain that spoils a good part of their lives is not ‘benign’.”

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The no-pill generation “questions the principle of medicating fertility and rejects the idea that contraception must [involve] the risk of side-effects,” writes Ms. Debusquat. More and more, a woman wants to be in touch with her natural body, to respect it just as she wants to respect the environment. Taking the pill means using doses of powerful hormones to interfere with a healthy process in her body: the cycle, ovulation, and a number of good effects achieved by a healthy hormonal balance.

Other reasons given by those in the survey to stop the pill included: “to return to my natural cycles,” “because of mistrust of the pharmaceutical industry,” “because of concern for the environment,” “to be consistent with my environmentally friendly lifestyle.”

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Many of the women in the study who stopped the pill started using a copper IUD (30%), a popular alternative in France. However, 9% reported using a fertility awareness based method, most often sympto-thermal (6.2%), pointing to a remarkable new trend, which Le Monde reported already in 2014. More and more people are communicating effectively about fertility awareness to the French public – for example:  Cycles Naturel , Sympto.org , Pryska DuCoeurJoly. It’s exciting to see the growing interest in family planning approaches that answer Sabrina Debusquat’s quest for a method without side-effects, truly environmentally friendly, and most egalitarian, since it works as a partnership.