this is your brain on birth control sarah hill

And oestrogen does some of our favourite things to our brains and bodies, making us feel sexier and more energetic.

But that also means the ovaries aren’t producing oestrogen, the hormone which dominates the first half of a woman’s natural cycle. Its primary ingredient is artificial progesterone – so-called progestin – which shuts down the brain signal that prompts egg development. The pill works mainly by mimicking the second half of a woman’s monthly ovulatory cycle, in which the hormone progesterone is dominant. How exactly does the pill affect women’s brains? The more information women have, the more it will bring them back to the pill. The backlash we are seeing against the pill, particularly with millennial women walking away from it, I think is because women haven’t felt right on it and have grown weary of doctors patting them on their heads and telling them they are wrong. For a long time, women have been experiencing “psychological” side-effects on the pill but nobody was telling them why. But we also have a blind spot when it comes to thinking about how changing women’s sex hormones – which is what the pill does – influences their brains. The pill, along with safe, legalised abortions, are the two biggest keys to women’s rights. It is to give them information they haven’t had up until now so they can make informed decisions.

My goal with this book is not to take the pill away or alarm women. My institution was founded as a Christian school, but it doesn’t have a particular religious bent now. Is your book trying to dissuade women from using the pill? Some US states have recently made it harder to get an abortion and the Trump administration is doing its best to chisel away at access to birth control.

How the Pill Changes Everything: Your Brain on Birth Control is her new book about the science behind a delicate subject.

But Sarah E Hill, a professor of social psychology at the Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas argues we need to talk about how oral contraceptives are affecting women’s thinking, emotions and behaviour. A t a time when women’s reproductive freedoms are under attack, any suggestion that the birth control pill could be problematic feels explosive.

This is your brain on birth control sarah hill