Are Young Women Totally Over The Pill?

Lately, I’ve felt like I’m the last Millennial still on the Pill.

- Julie Vadnal

For as long as I can remember, my girlfriends have set a daily alarm to remind themselves to pop their tiny tablets. In high school, it seemed as though everyone was taking it – for acne, for bad cramps and, you know, to prevent pregnancy. At varsity, when more of us were actually having sex on the reg, the trusty Pill achieved true BFF status. But these days, we’re kind of growing apart. One of my pals blames it for her blood clots; another told me that taking it from age 13 to 34 was enough. One ditched it because she suspected the hormones were messing with her metabolism. I’m still swallowing it, for now – but my Pill pack has started to seem like a Discman in a Spotify world (and not in a hip, ironic way).

When the Pill debuted in 1960, it was a huge deal. By 1967, nearly 13-million women in the world were using it (in place of condoms and diaphragms, mostly). ‘Women were suddenly in a position of having contraception options other than not to have sex,’ says gynaecologist Lauren Streicher, director of the Northwestern Medicine Center for Sexual Medicine and Menopause.

By the 1980s, up to 80- million women were users and enjoying the new-found freedom that came with the Pill’s 91% effectiveness (99% when used perfectly). Since it hit the market, the number of women in the workforce has more than tripled. Just try to name another pharmaceutical product that has done so much for womankind. (No, not Viagra.) R-E-S-P-E-C-T. So why the sudden lack of gratitude?

COSMO teamed up with Power to Decide, a campaign to prevent unplanned pregnancies, to find out. And what we discovered – in a survey of more than 2 000 young women – signals a massive birth-control shift.