For instance, a woman named Lizzy Morris recently talked about her experience with a hormonal IUD on TikTok. “I did not know the risks,” says Morris in the video, as she points to a picture of an X-ray where, she says, her IUD became embedded in her uterus. She had to have it surgically removed.
Morris, a mom of three young children who lives in Georgia, said in an interview that her intention was not to scare people off birth control, but to bring awareness to the risks that she believes doctors don’t often make clear enough to patients.
One survey showed that 29% of women felt their doctor had dismissed their health concerns in the previous two years.
Morris says she has often felt rushed or overlooked by doctors. Even when the risks of a type of birth control are low, she says, she would rather know about them – and she thinks doctors should discuss them. “ People deserve that informed choice,” she says.
Many in the medical community agree that lack of conversation about side effects is a problem.
But Jensen says that in the short time clinicians often have with their patients, focusing on uncommon side effects may mean less time to focus on those that are more likely.
With an IUD, for example, Jensen says, complications that require surgery are rare – one study suggested that for every 1,000 IUDs, between one and two result in “intrauterine migration,” which can require surgery to remove, and this is often a minimally invasive procedure.
Common side effects like irregular bleeding are more worthy of discussion, he says: “That’s something that actually clinicians should do a much better job at focusing on.”
The bigger picture
Clinicians stress the importance of weighing potential side effects of hormonal birth control against the risks of unplanned pregnancy.
Aside from the choice to have a child or not, pregnancy itself can be dangerous, points out Jensen. Abortion restrictions compound that risk.
“It’s not that long ago that the most likely way you would die as a woman would be in an obstetrically related event during labor,” says Jensen. “Social media often gives no context around what exposure to pregnancy means to women.”
