Your Brain on Birth Control with Sarah E. Hill, Lilianne Ploumen & Peter Vonk

THE FUTURE OF CONTRACEPTION
Your Brain on Birth Control with a.o. Sarah E. Hill, Estrella Montoya and Lilianne Ploumen
Coproduced with Elle Magazine (NL) and Nijgh & Van Ditmar
At a time when women’s reproductive freedoms are under attack, any suggestion that the birth control pill could be problematic feels tricky. But Sarah E. Hill, professor of social psychology, argues in her new book we need to talk about how oral contraceptives are affecting women’s thinking, emotions and behaviour. Are concerns about hormonal contraception justified? What are the alternatives? Why isn’t there a male oral contraceptive yet?
While it’s still the main choice of contraception, more and more young women are questioning how well the pill fits into their lives. Women turn to non-hormonal IUDs, cycle-tracking apps and condoms. Tonight we investigate the effects of the pill on your brain with Sarah E. Hill, dive into (male) alternatives and fantasise about a society where the responsibility to NOT get pregnant would be fairly distributed over its all its members. What role should GPs, politicians and men have considering contraception?
Please stay tuned for the complete line-up.
Note: we do not question the great successes and importance of the contraceptive pill: it gave (and still gives) women more reproductive rights, it increased social, educational, economical and sexual chances. Nonetheless we feel it’s important to investigate the impact of the pill on women’s brains, especially now more and more women are searching for non-hormonal alternatives. The appearance of the Dutch translation of Sarah E. Hill’s new book ‘Je brein aan de pil’ is new motivation to discuss the matter.
Speakers
Sarah E. Hill is at the forefront of groundbreaking research on the effects of the pill. A star psychologist with a PhD from the University of Texas, she studied with one of the founding fathers of evolutionary psychology, David M. Buss. In less than a decade, she’s published over 50 scientific articles and has secured half a million dollars’ worth of federal research grant money to study women, their health, and their mating and sexual psychology. She is regularly featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Scientific American, The Economist, and many others.
Estrella Montoya is a researcher at the Department ox Experimental Psychology at Utrecht University. During her PhD project she investigated the effects of testosterone and cortisol on social and emotional behaviour. Currently, her work focuses on the hormones estradiol and progesterone, which have received relatively little attention in the scientific literature. This is remarkable because estradiol and progesterone are the main ingredients of the widely used oral contraceptive pill. The aim of Montoya’s research is to answer the question of how the pill influences emotion regulation.
Lilianne Ploumen is a politician (PvdA) and member of the House of Representatives. She has been an advocate for reproductive rights and contraception. Ploumen started the “She Decides” campaign, an initiative of about 50 countries, organizations and foundations to finance global family planning initiatives.
Ineke van der Vlugt is programme coordinator at Rutgers, institute for sexual reproductive health and rights. Tonight she will talk about what responsibility men should have when it comes to contraceptives, according to Rutgers.
Peter Vonk, is a general practitioner at Huisartsen Oude Turfmarkt, a large general practice in the centre of Amsterdam, and director of the Student Medical Centre of the University of Amsterdam. In this practice, all forms of contraception, except sterilisation, are prescribed and applied.
More info: debalie.nl/agenda/your-brain-on-birth-control/

[@taniafoniciello]

1:26:46 that is not true. Not every doctor knows this. Not even all Gynecologists. Not either all psychologists. In all 3 cases, I’ve had experiences of discussing side effect issues which often they try to play down, or tell you it’s in your head, and not because of the pill. The lack of honest discussion and awareness around this topic is in 2023 is appalling. It’s not normal that the patient knows more on the topic than a professional. How can we trust the medical system for these things??

[@sierramclellan7763]

Completely agree! This is a scary reality that needs to be addressed ASAP

[@dogpoo4040]

1:47:00 this confirmed their point in a very powerful way. Can’t believe a large portion of the information women have been able to access at the physician’s office has been cherry picked by these men, who blatantly fail to recognize the concept of risk benefit analysis.

[@jon_eberle]

"women do not live in a vacuum" @23:45 this neurobiology impacts men, any relationship, all of humanity

[@joleenbaynes2852]

There is still much discussions we need to have around this. Yes the research is correlative not causal but we need to create safe spaces where women can speak up and find ways to deal with the side effects, especially mood swings. Because being told by family, male and female, that it’s all in your head doesn’t help anything. Also it’s hard to explain the fog to yourself, how much more to someone who has already has a ‘solution’. I left the pill and still experiencing side effects from the imbalance caused. Honestly, if I’d known I’d rather not have started

[@Dotcomnieuwscom]

The latest info is the study who showed it is shrinking the hypothalamus of women

[@glorythurman9962]

I've been in th shot for about 2 years and I'm getting off of it today.

[@marthasyravong9776]

Replay 40:50 “No such thing as local normal side affect” w/birth control which is commonly told for IUD ….

[@Laura-ps3tb]

I believe it affects fertility and has something to do with so many woman being unable to get pregnant

[@Amy-tg7tu]

If you keep telling your body for decades that you do not need the reproductive function of course you are going to have difficulties getting pregnant when you come off the pill. It’s so unfortunate we’re all not well informed on any of this and it’s hard to find reliable sources or open discussions on this topic

[@hannanatalisa3282]

It is a medical castration.

[@Zvire09]

there are many reasons for that, mainly the amount of toxic chemicals that we put into our bodies

[@srdjanstevanovic3543]

That short clip shown somewhere in 39 minute, is realy frightening .Hormonal contraception can be bad for women, so lets find a solution for that by throwing responsability for woman sex life on a mail shoulders, and that with a subtile emotional manipulation contained in that clip.Woman earned right to by masters of they own actions, now myst learn to be responsible for them too.If you mess with your own biology, you are responsible, not someone else.

[@oldspammer]

A lengthy comment that I made here was censored in under 1 second by the Google AI. How great is that?

[@HudaRamadan44]

What was it about?

[@oldspammer]

@@HudaRamadan44It was slightly less than 6,416 characters in length, had slightly less than 40 paragraphs, slightly less than 1009 words as reported by the GNU Linux word count command applied to the save text file. It said that if this birth control drug influenced women's psychological preferences for their mate selection, it would extremely negatively influence evolution of people within countries using it, including political policy support or lack thereof for men's versus women's ways of thinking and doing things to affect positive or negative views against truth, lies, Conservatism versus Socialism, noble versus ignoble ways of thinking. A professor of psychology and neuroscience who has been studying the structure of the brain by how various brain regions when injured impact various forms of thinking and that would be impacted by the decline in testosterone in males and females that would negatively impact libido of subsequent generations once off the pill raising a nuclear family. It mentioned the specific name of the scientist involved so that further information about what they have said could be reviews by those concerned (everyone).

[@oldspammer]

@@HudaRamadan44Further, mention was made of a very tall female volley ball athlete residing in UK originating from America who is a critical thinker regarding the course of recent human behaviors that have been governed by female choices that have ended up badly for them such as the considerations taken by them in evaluating relationship decisions regarding "the bad boys" and putting nice guys into the dreaded "friend zone" and then wondering why these bad decisions cause them no end of sorrow afterward because their thinking influenced by these chemicals was in fact extremely mistaken to have taken those wrong turns in their life trajectories.

[@oldspammer]

@@HudaRamadan44It talked about the catastrophic decline in rates of birth of the smartest populations on the planet, and a corresponding rise of the birth rates of the most dull minded populations. I strongly intimated that mental acuity was heritable from genes that project evolutionary changes so that the population of smart is on the rapid decline while the population of extremely NOT smart is on the rapid increase. I said that male and female brain and thinking differences were complimentary and useful for survival long term of humans, but that these differences were being erased by chemical pollution deliberately poured into our drinking water, store shelf products, food, and that this was the opposite of positive progress.

[@oldspammer]

@@HudaRamadan44 The success of human flourishing was being reversed by policies permitting such pollution. People's offspring shall be harmed. Philosophical thinkers had warned that this was likely to happen if a preference for villainy were to gain strong support, and that soon everyone would be not smart and ill-behaved and so would be much easier enslaved.

[@SensationalBanana]

So a woman with PCOS is shit out of luck? My PCOS cannot be managed with diet, only the birth control pill... Without the pill, my hair falls out and I have the worst possible period pains. I hate life.

[@yianni28]

try carnivore diet (or eat more meat)

[@hannanatalisa3282]

Daily fasting and eat dominantly animal sourced foods (meat, eggs, fish, etc).

[@alecwillson1591]

No, what a stupidly simple way of viewing things, just because something is bad for women as a whole doesn't mean it has 0 application. You were given a whole pile of grey matter. Use it.

[@JW-qz4jl]

Your body is probably stuck in fight or flight

[@travisc1883]

25:10 ya goober

[@MrJob91]

1:47:00 XD haha

[@hannanatalisa3282]

What's so funny?

[@tanitaf1345]

Put a strict law with a big penalty amount to men who leaves a pregnant woman alone and maybe they get more involved

[@SlayerOfTheDamned]

Make mandatory that those babies and fathers are given a DNA test and you have a done deal (So long as that is the actual father)

[@RS-chino]

So it sounds like you are willing to force men to take care of a child they don't want. Are you willing to force women to keep a child they don't want for a man that does?

[@WhizzingFish12]

Bad logic here unless you are A) Willing to have DNA test to verify its his and B) Fathers have equal rights as to whether the child is born or not and then that he then has full amd equal custody rights. A woman can't have all the choice and all the power and then also have the man on the hook when he has no say. Or you could teach young women that sex is a serious act with serious potential consequences and to choose their partners wisely.

[@yianni28]

if a man gets a woman pregnant he has to pay child support, if he doesnt he loses his drivers license and then ends up in jail. and you cant get around child support and there are plenty of online calculators