You should be more concerned with the psychological effects of birth control, which in my opinion are drastically understated and underesearched. We are toying with the hormones of tens of millions of women and the vast majority are unaware of the potential differences in decisionmaking and behavior.

There are secondary effects as well, for example, women have been shown to select for more dominant, aggressive men when fertile and meeker providers when not - how might that shape our social landscape, if a sizable proportion of women are kept permanently in a hormonally induced infertile state?

0. https://magazine.tcu.edu/fall-2020/hormonal-birth-control-br...

1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15236788/

Your first link is from TCU (tcu.edu), Texas Christian University. The entirety of TCU is opposed to birth control.

Your second link lists only St. Anthony Family Practice Residency Program as an affiliation.

I can't say one way or the other whether your assertions are valid. But your choice of sources warrants caution.

not to mention the risk of blood clots. my wife had thrombosis and nearly died because of birth control meds, and once you look into it, it's more common than you'd think and women do not get nearly enough warning about the risk. All her friends went back to condoms and those more localized IUD hormone things

If millions of women haven't noticed a change in behavior in real life my default assumption is the change of behavior only occurs in the artificial conditions created by the researchers themselves.

This assumes most people notice most changes in their behavior in real life. Some may subtly change over time, others may be in blind spots... and it's not like many people are tracking themselves in this kind of way. You might be overestimating people's introspection here. Think of all the people who start overeating without noticing or even start doing something radically different without reflecting.

And you may be overestimating the reliability of brain science studies.

If scientists had a camera and microphone in every room on earth (which is of course impossible) they would learn a lot more about humans than they would with studies in artificial lab environments where they have to guess if the results have any applicability to real human behavior in real human environments.

I have no idea why you thought anything I said had to do with "brain science" studies.

If anything a more likely cause is statins in older people, which are known to cause violent rage.

Reductions in empathy, increases in “hey what’s the harm”... kind of like society over the last few years?

When did society have a lot of empathy? We're nowhere near as crazy right now as 1970, 1930… not even 1990, you should see the violent crime stats then.

Ouch, that is a lot.

There is something like Serotonin Irritation Syndrome which can cause aggressive feelings and thoughts. Personally I tried to increase my serotonin twice, once with Tryptophan a few years ago and recently with Inositol. Both times I felt very aggressive. Maybe I should use it right before a chess game, who knows it helps ;)

It is sometimes mentioned that for people who are sensitive to psychosis (like me) this can be a tipping point towards aggressive behaviour.

I tried an SSRI for a month, after the first week I was getting into more arguments for no reasons. Usually I'll have some (at least vague) lucidity as to why I'm upset, but at that time I didn't and it made me feel quite stupid. Never doing those again.