STUDY ANALYSIS: The Pill and Women's Brains II

A new study suggests an even greater depth to the biological and behavioural changes caused by hormonal contraception

A little while ago I wrote about a new study that showed hormonal birth control could be having serious effects on women’s brains. This may not be news to you, especially if you’ve ever had a girlfriend or friend on the Pill, or if you’ve been on it yourself. But the full truth of what’s actually going on, the changes that are actually taking place at a biological level, is shocking—or it should be.

A team of researchers from Canada has investigated current and long-term effects of the use of combined oral contraceptives (COC), with a particular focus on regions of the brain involved in the processing and regulation of fear. Previous research had already shown that COCs modulate fear processing in the brain, but the researchers from Canada wanted to go further and provide more detailed evidence for how this process takes place.

The authors of that study explained how hormonal birth control appears to shrink an important region of the brain, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, that’s associated with fear and emotional processing more broadly.

In our study, we show that healthy women currently using COCs had a thinner ventromedial prefrontal cortex than men.

This part of the prefrontal cortex is thought to sustain emotion regulation, such as decreasing fear signals in the context of a safe situation. Our result may represent a mechanism by which COCs could impair emotion regulation in women.

What the researchers found was that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex in women who were currently using COCs was significantly thinner compared to men.

Interestingly, this reduced thickness was not observed in women who had discontinued use of COCs in the past. This suggests that the behavioural changes may be reversible if use of the Pill ceases.

The possibility that this thinning effect might be reversible is the only potential silver lining to this study, which otherwise suggests that the Pill really may be having profound effects on the behaviour of the tens of millions of women—and hundreds of millions worldwide—who take it.

I don’t think it’s too outlandish too suggest that mass use of the Pill could have profound effects on society at every level, from individual relationships and birth rates to politics. Disinhibition of millions of young women—by which I mean, the dysregulation of fear, in particular—might be one reason why there is a profound gender-based political split taking place, with women drifting ever-further leftward, away from men.

We like to imagine that our opponents, the people who vote for open borders and mass immigration and the mutilation of children and the early release of violent criminals, have shrunken brains, but it may actually be true. And the Pill may be the reason, or at least part of it.

Another study, released this week, shows that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is essential for decision-making and, in particular, “pro-social” decision-making. That basically means decision-making that has a beneficial effect on the wider group.

Again, this is evidence that widespread use of the Pill could be having population-level effects on women’s behaviour that are far from desirable: the Pill could be making it harder for women to think properly in the interests of the group, whether that’s their family, their local community or the nation.