The Washington Post has been hemorrhaging subscribers and web traffic for years. Late last year, the paper conducted yet another round of layoffs, impacting hundreds of employees.
Jeff Bezos purchased the paper for $250 million a decade ago, and last year alone, it managed to lose roughly $100 million. This is not a profitable venture, and in normal circumstances, businesses that lose this much money don’t stay around very long. But the Washington Post has stuck around. Jeff Bezos has kept it on life support to fulfill a specific mission, which is to harangue and censor independent voices on behalf of Jeff Bezos’ donors in the Democratic Party.
A couple of days ago, that mission was on full display.
On March 21st, The Washington Post published an article entitled, “Women are getting off birth control amid misinformation explosion.” The Daily Beast ran a similar story, warning ominously of an “explosion” of women who are ditching birth control amid a “misinformation blitz.”
First of all, it needs to be said that any time the media collectively decides to label something “misinformation,” they really mean “information that we find personally or politically inconvenient.” They’re not interested in proving you wrong, they’re interested in shutting you up. And that’s exactly what’s happening here.
As the Washington Post piece says: “Brett Cooper, a media commentator for the conservative Daily Wire, argued in a viral TikTok clip that birth control can impact fertility, cause women to gain weight and even alter whom they are attracted to. It racked up over 219,000 ‘likes’ before TikTok removed it following The Post’s inquiry.” The piece goes on to describe other similar videos that the Post also wants to be deleted from the internet.
For example, this one, from Ben Shapiro’s show a year ago:
It’s hard to imagine a more anodyne clip than that. This is not a woman making up crazy, unhinged conspiracy theories about birth control. She’s not expressing some dangerous, unscientific opinion. She doesn’t even appear to be political. She’s just articulating a very reasonable, increasingly common concern, which is that taking unnatural hormones might have some unexpected and unwanted effects on the human body. Even if you don’t know anything about the scientific data on this point, that’s not a crazy thing to believe.
But as that clip goes on, they do talk about some of the research on this point. None of this is quack science. It’s widely accepted in medical literature.
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For example, a recent study out of Denmark, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry found that, “hormonal contraception use doubles the risk of suicide attempt, and triples the risk of suicide.” The study specifically found that “the association between hormonal contraception and primary outcomes peaked at 2 months, but continued even after the cessation of hormonal contraception for some years.” The researchers also reported that hormonal contraceptives were connected with a 70% increase in rates of depression.
Before I get into the specifics of what other studies have found, it’s important to pause here and take another look at how the Washington Post is framing this story. Here’s the first paragraph:
Search for ‘birth control’ on TikTok or Instagram and a cascade of misleading videos vilifying hormonal contraception appear: Young women blaming their weight gain on the pill. Right-wing commentators claiming that some birth control can lead to infertility. Testimonials complaining of depression and anxiety. … Physicians say they’re seeing an explosion of birth-control misinformation online targeting a vulnerable demographic.
The implication of what the Post wrote is that it’s “misinformation” to say that birth control is related to “depression and anxiety.” But that’s not true. At no point in the Washington Post’s article did they debunk the study from Denmark. They don’t even mention it. Instead, they simply state, as a matter of fact, that you’re crazy if you link birth control to weight gain, infertility, or depression. They claim the only significant side effects of birth control medication are blood clots. But they’re wrong, on all counts.
One of the main reasons they’re wrong is that hormonal birth control inhibits the body’s natural reaction to stress. As a UCLA Health study put it late last year:
Researchers at the UCLA Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences’ Laboratory for Stress Assessment and Research found contraceptive users and non-users processed stress differently at the molecular level, with contraceptive users also reporting a more negative psychological response to stress compared to non-users.
Is it possible that disrupting the body’s natural stress response might lead to weight gain, given that weight gain is one of the most common symptoms of stress? The Washington Post thinks you’re a science denier if you even suggest that. They’ll have you pulled off TikTok if you even mention the possibility. And that’s weird, because less than a year ago, NBC News ran this report, in which their medical experts explain that weight gain and hair loss are among the symptoms of hormonal birth control. Watch:
I guess we’re expected to believe that at some point between May and this week, the science changed. But actually, it didn’t. Going back to the UCLA study, researchers confirmed existing research which found that:
hormonal contraceptive pills may increase women’s risk for chronically elevated inflammation, which carries the long-term risk of developing illnesses such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, and autoimmune disorders, as well as potential mood disorders, including depression.
The lead author at UCLA added:
Cortisol gets a bad rap, but increases in cortisol in response to stress help the body manage stressful situations. … If women on the pill are having these increases in cortisol but their mood is getting worse, it could mean that the pill is preventing their bodies and minds from returning to normal following stress.
The truth is that hormonal birth control does come with all kinds of risks and side effects. All drugs do. Drugs that suppress the normal, healthy functions of the body are always especially risky. And that includes potential impacts on fertility, as much as the Washington Post doesn’t want to admit it. Right now, if you go to the Planned Parenthood website, you’ll find that they recommend a method of hormonal birth control known as “the Depo shot.”
The depo shot (AKA Depo-Provera) is an injection you get once every 3 months. It’s a safe, convenient, and private birth control method that works really well if you always get it on time.
What Planned Parenthood doesn’t mention on their website is that the “depo shot” has clear and proven impacts on fertility. This is from the WebMD website, which on most days, the Washington Post agrees is a reliable source:
Injectable birth control (Depo-Provera): Unlike other forms of hormonal birth control, it may be harder to get pregnant after you stop getting these shots. It may take 10 months or more before you ovulate again. For some women, it will take up to 18 months for periods to start again.
So this is a method of hormonal birth control that does impact fertility after you stop taking it. In fact, it can make women infertile for a very long time. This isn’t some conspiracy theory — and neither is the idea that hormonal birth control can contribute to weight gain, depression and suicide. The same sources that the Left tells us to trust at every opportunity — established medical researchers — are very clear on this. But the “trust the science” crowd has suddenly become very distrusting of science.
And that’s not the only platitude they’re abandoning in order to censor anyone who speaks critically about birth control. Remember “my body, my choice?” If these people really believed in the “my body my choice” mantra, they would celebrate, or at least accept, that an increasing number of young women are choosing to forgo birth control. But birth control is central to their cultural agenda.
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With fewer women on the pill, more women will become mothers, and some of them will drop out of the workforce and discover fulfillment and happiness as wives and homemakers. This is the real crisis that the Washington Post and the other Left wing rags are worried about. The last thing that the elites want to see is a movement of women fully embracing their own womanhood, and men fully embracing their manhood. A move back towards the family, away from materialism and self-preoccupation and towards marriage and parenthood. These people have been waging a war on the family for decades, and the birth control pill is their nuclear bomb. The family is the greatest threat to them. And a society full of families — of intact, happy families, with attentive mothers and strong fathers — that is a society that has rendered these people powerless. That is their fear. And they fear it like they fear nothing else.
And politically, of course we know that unhappy career middle managers at Citibank are one of the core constituencies of the Democratic Party. If they rebel, Democrats will have real trouble winning another election. And they’re willing to do anything — including lying to women about the serious and even fatal drug side effects of birth control, and so many other drugs — to prevent that from happening.