My wife has had issues with almost everything she's been on. The only thing remotely acceptable to her has been the depo shot but she still had to deal with migraines, mood swings, considerable weight gain, and body hair. I finally said enough is enough and took the high road: I apologized for the last decade she accepted as "normal human life" and requested her to stop her contraceptives immediately. I called up the doctor and demanded a vasectomy. Problem solved. She's much happier now.

edit: the number of side effects for some of these female contraceptives are staggering and many women aren't aware of the entire scope of possibilities. I suspect most women are affected and don't realize it, just accepting it as normal because their friends have the same issues.

Unfortunately, that headache, migraine, loss of sex drive, yeast infections, increased blood pressure and so on are often thought to be "normal". So many side effects are accepted as a fact of life and hormonal contraceptives as the source to those side effects is widely ignored. By both, women and doctors unfortunately.

Yes, but hundreds of millions of women also bounce around between different types of hormonal birth control (variations in pill type versus Depo shots versus NuvaRing versus Mirena versus the patch, etc.) because they have miserable experiences with physical and/or emotional side effects.

I know this is anecdata, but I know two different young healthy women who suffered strokes or Deep Vein Thrombosis before the age of thirty because of Yaz. (Both fully recovered, thank God, but will never be able to take hormonal pills again for life.)

> I know this is anecdata, but I know two different young healthy women who suffered strokes or Deep Vein Thrombosis before the age of thirty because of Yaz. (Both fully recovered, thank God, but will never be able to take hormonal pills again for life.)

The cause/effect relationship between elevated estrogen levels and clotting disorders is well understood by physiologists. All the old high-estrogen contraceptive pills have been pulled, because the data shows that they were not safe.

Well understood now, yes, but Yaz was heavily marketed to young women as being the latest and greatest thing on the market, and it passed FDA approval and came from major manufacturers -- yet it didn't get pulled off the shelves until 2011, after many deaths and strokes.

I support women having easier access to birth control, but my point is that even today, this stuff has a different safety profile than, like, Pepto Bismol or Advil.

(But then again, so does Tylenol, and that's legal, so...)

I've never met a women who didn't have any side effects from birth control. They just lived with them because it was better than the alternative.

The alternative being primarily unwanted pregnancy or menstrual symptoms? I ask because there's a lot of good ways to prevent pregnancy but not as much for the latter.