The Birth Control Episode: The Pill Isn’t Bulletproof – Sarah Hill, Ph.D.

When women are on the birth control pill, it influences everything ranging from their ability to learn and remember things, who they're attracted to, who they choose as romantic partners, the nature of the stress response, their tendency towards anxiety and depression, and a whole host of other bodily systems, ranging from thyroid function to the immune system.

Women now will have sex with men that our great-grandmothers wouldn't have dreamed of having sex with because he lives in his mom's basement and plays video games all day. But, like, if he's cute, now women, because we can feel all but completely certain that we're not going to end up pregnant, women have sort of lowered their standards for a sexual partner.

Any form of hormonal contraception seems to increase a woman's risk for subsequently developing anxiety or depression.

Women who chose their partners on the birth control pill, they reported that their children were having more health problems and had to go to the doctor more frequently than the children that were had by women who chose their partners when they were not on the birth control pill.

All forms of hormonal contraceptives... increases not only a woman's odds of developing depression and anxiety but also their suicide risk.

There's been research showing that women who are on the pill choose partners who are less masculine—they have less masculine faces—than partners that are chosen by women who are naturally cycling.

I don't think that it's probably the best thing for brain health—having long-term exposure to the birth control pill just because you are keeping levels of estrogen so low, and we know that estrogen is neuroprotective.

[Birth control] pill taking-women exhibit an unwavering preference for the types of relatively less masculine faces and voices preferred by naturally cycling women.

Ultimately, traits that promote survival and traits that promote reproduction get inherited, and traits that get inherited are those that have led to sex. Our brains are just like absolutely wired, top to bottom, for sex...

What you find in people who have experienced chronic stress and also in women who are on the birth control pill is that they have smaller hippocampi.

What happens a lot of times with women when they're on birth control is they kind of feel like a 'blah, blah, blah' version of themselves. They don't feel sexy and vibrant, and they sort of lose touch with those parts of who they are.

When women are on the pill, when they look at pictures of their partners, they have the same biological response as if they're looking at a stranger. But, when you're off the pill and you look at a picture of your partner, your reward centers of the brain light up.

When you have hormonal contraception, when you have the birth control pill, you're rewriting women. You're just rewriting who they are in the service of making this one small change, which is suppressing ovulation.

Generally, people prefer the scent of people whose MHC genes are different than theirs. The reason for this is that when you partner with somebody whose MHC genes are different than yours, it's going to allow your children to recognize a greater diversity of pathogens.

There's a lot of research indicating that when women choose partners that have very similar MHC genes, there's a greater rate of spontaneous abortion relative to what you find in couples that have MHC dissimilar genes.

There's no question about it, that when you are on the birth control pill, it blunts your attunement to sex-related stimuli. It blunts your attunement to your own sexuality, it blunts your attunement to men, and it blunts their attunement to you. And because of this, if you're at times in your life when those kinds of distractions are counterproductive, you can use the birth control pill as a way to sort of help meet your life goals.

About half of women who go on the pill go off of it right away because they can't stand the way that it makes them feel.