JustPearlyThings - August 01, 2023


Doctor DEBUNKS All Pro Choice Fallacies

Topics
hormonal contraception effects on attraction
Hosted by
Hannah Pearl Davis
Mentioned
Sarah Hill Birth Control Gongus Kahn
You Won't Believe Who She CHEATED With The TRUTH On Why Men End RELATIONSHIPS

Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

178.51

Word count

1,781

Sentence count

143

Harmful content

Misogyny

9

sentences flagged

Toxicity

5

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I'm joined by author and journalist, Sarah Hill, to talk about abortion, birth control and the pill. We talk about the pros and cons of birth control, the benefits and the dangers of abortion and how to make sure women are informed about it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 And so the final thing that I would say about that is, firstly, you don't get a load more unwanted babies.
00:00:08.960 Secondly, even if you did get those unwanted babies, they would be adopted in an instant.
00:00:13.880 Finally, when you look at the statistics of these kids, they actually have pretty much the same quality of life as anyone else.
00:00:21.460 When you follow these kids who there's a study recently where the mum went to get an abortion. 0.98
00:00:28.140 She was turned away and told she couldn't have one.
00:00:30.680 She has the baby.
00:00:32.420 And then they follow these kids up and look at their mental health and things like that.
00:00:36.760 What they found was that the mental health of those kids is almost identical to the average child.
00:00:41.220 No way.
00:00:42.140 So like this narrative that they'll have terrible lives, they'll all be abused, they'll all have depression.
00:00:46.280 There's just no evidence for it.
00:00:47.760 They have pretty much the same lives.
00:00:49.020 They're very happy to be alive on average.
00:00:51.400 Wow.
00:00:52.460 And, you know, people will come up with anecdotes and they'll say, I know a kid who, you know, who should have been.
00:00:56.660 Who wished that they were dead.
00:00:59.200 Yeah, like, yeah, that's not what they'll say. 0.96
00:01:00.800 But like, yeah, they'll basically say, in effect, I know a kid who should be dead.
00:01:05.440 And you're like, you live in like the best, freest.
00:01:08.160 And like, normally that kid would have been a wanted pregnancy.
00:01:11.360 So abortion was never on the table. 0.54
00:01:13.660 But even if it was, like, it's just an anecdote.
00:01:16.560 That's not the reality for the average kid.
00:01:18.220 Do you think that they're honest to women about abortion and the effects that it has and how it's performed, birth control, all this stuff? 0.85
00:01:28.060 Who's they?
00:01:28.980 Doctors.
00:01:29.940 No way.
00:01:30.380 No, I think, you know, there's so much that women are not typically told about abortion.
00:01:38.460 Even, you know, you look at, you read the abortion manuals and it will say for like a second trimester surgical abortion, take the baby out, dismember it, etc.
00:01:48.700 Hide the parts from the woman when you dispose of them. 0.94
00:01:54.040 Like, it's an explicit attempt for them not to find out.
00:01:57.720 You know, there are many undercover situations where women, pregnant women have gone into the abortion clinic. 0.53
00:02:02.860 They've asked for answers and they've been told, oh, don't worry about that.
00:02:06.820 Or they've been lied to or whatever.
00:02:08.040 Like, it's really a deliberate attempt in many cases just to hide the truth.
00:02:12.280 And there are many things that even the more sort of well-meaning, honest doctors just fail to tell women.
00:02:17.840 So they don't tell women that PTSD is a common or a very common complication of abortion.
00:02:23.100 They don't tell women that you're more likely to have all sorts of mental health problems after an abortion.
00:02:27.900 They usually don't tell women the fetal development.
00:02:30.960 They might lie and say it doesn't feel pain even at 20, 24 weeks.
00:02:35.380 There are so many things that women should be informed that they just aren't. 0.76
00:02:39.560 And so sometimes that's just well-meaning ignorance from doctors or abortion providers.
00:02:44.960 Sometimes it is occasionally it's just straight up deceit or wanting to hide the truth.
00:02:50.040 But it's certainly common that women are not told everything they should be. 0.98
00:02:53.300 So what about the pill?
00:02:54.560 I know before the interview started you mentioned that there's some effects of the pill that women don't particularly know about.
00:03:01.680 Yeah, so this is, I mean, so I was telling you about one book in particular, which is Sarah Hill's book, Your Brain on the Pill, or Your Brain on Birth Control, something like this, how the pill changes everything.
00:03:13.960 And I just found it fascinating.
00:03:15.840 So Sarah Hill is a, she comes across pretty feminist-y. 1.00
00:03:18.960 She says, I'm not against the pill.
00:03:20.440 I was on it and I thought it was right for me.
00:03:22.220 I think it's right for a whole load of women. 1.00
00:03:25.260 So she's not, you know, like an ideologue against the pill on the whole.
00:03:29.900 But she says we have to be honest, especially with young girls, about the effect it has on your body, on your mind, on your relationships.
00:03:39.020 Because, and actually it was fascinating.
00:03:41.780 I was reading a book from the 1960s about contraception when they were sort of developing modern hormonal birth control.
00:03:51.020 And it was fascinating.
00:03:52.820 One of the doctors in that book, who was, you know, a leading proponent of birth control, he was like, all this talk about hormonal birth control is just crazy.
00:04:02.460 We can't be serious that we're actually going to give hormonal birth control to women because it has so many effects around the body.
00:04:08.620 You don't just take a hormone and it has like one effect.
00:04:12.160 Like the point of hormones is that they change everything.
00:04:15.300 And he's like, this is absolutely nuts.
00:04:17.180 There's no way this is going to take off.
00:04:18.960 I just read that, you know, in 2023, like, wow.
00:04:23.500 90% of women have been on birth control.
00:04:25.460 Exactly.
00:04:25.980 Like it's, you know, when you think what it is, it's typically a hormone, sometimes two hormones, you know, whatever.
00:04:31.880 The point of hormones is that they do so many things all around the body.
00:04:38.900 They don't just have one effect.
00:04:40.000 They don't just stop you getting pregnant. 1.00
00:04:41.620 It's a hormone.
00:04:42.380 They do everything.
00:04:43.720 And so it's inevitable that when you take these and, yeah, like I say, the hormonal contraception is exactly that.
00:04:50.700 It will have effects everywhere.
00:04:52.900 So, for example, we know that it affects your stress response.
00:04:57.020 So when you're stressed, whether, you know, mentally stressed or physically stressed, you will mount a physiological response that involves cortisol.
00:05:05.760 It will help you to be more physically active.
00:05:08.040 It will be help you to be more alert.
00:05:10.000 It will do all sorts of things.
00:05:11.660 What we know is that hormonal contraception actually blunts that response and it or it can affect it in various different ways.
00:05:20.380 And so what will happen is that your stress response on contraception will be sort of disfigured.
00:05:26.220 So you may not respond to stressful situations in the right way.
00:05:30.360 You might not respond to stressful situations, which is a bad thing because you won't be able to be active.
00:05:36.240 You might respond to them in a dysfunctional way.
00:05:38.800 You might get stressed all the time or more often than you should be, which, of course, is a huge contributor to all sorts of things like depression.
00:05:46.260 And we know that there's a big link between suicide and hormonal contraception in general, especially for teenage girls.
00:05:52.140 So there's a lot of effects in terms of your response to stress.
00:05:56.960 We know that there's a significant impact on mental health problems and your mood, particularly with suicide rates.
00:06:03.100 We know that it affects who you're attracted to.
00:06:07.740 So, you know, every girl knows this when they hit puberty, right?
00:06:10.920 They're like, oh, your hormones will be going crazy.
00:06:13.120 You might find you start getting attracted to people, that sort of thing.
00:06:15.840 Everyone knows these hormones make a difference on your mood, your attraction and so on.
00:06:22.120 What they have found is that hormonal contraception affects your sexual desire, your libido.
00:06:28.240 It affects your sexual preferences.
00:06:32.280 So just as an example, one of the things that Sarah Hill talks about is that she will have friends or people that she's spoken to.
00:06:39.000 You know, this is anecdotal, but it's true on a large scale.
00:06:43.460 There will be people who will take hormonal contraception, you know, during their teenage years, early 20s, whatever.
00:06:49.760 They will get married and then they will go off contraception because they're ready to have a baby now. 0.98
00:06:57.460 And what they will find when they go off contraception is that they're no longer attracted to their husband
00:07:02.100 because they were only attracted to their husband because they were on these hormones which were making them attracted.
00:07:07.980 Now, there's specific ways in which it does this.
00:07:11.480 I can't remember the details, so I'm not going to make it up.
00:07:13.240 But it was something like, I think it was that hormonal contraception makes you more attracted to effeminate men.
00:07:21.280 Yeah, I've heard that.
00:07:22.680 Okay, yes, I think that's the case.
00:07:23.980 Because it tricks you into thinking you're already pregnant, right?
00:07:27.280 It can do, yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah.
00:07:29.160 So you have that sort of response.
00:07:30.600 Because I thought it was like, when we're ovulating, we go for men, like genes, like the best genes,
00:07:39.560 because it's like there's genes and there's resources and provisioning.
00:07:42.920 And I heard that we're more attracted when we're not ovulating to men that are provisioning,
00:07:48.800 like more the long-term security guys.
00:07:50.640 Yeah, and so I heard, I mean, this is me, guys, don't quote me on this.
00:07:55.460 But I heard that it's like when it tricks you into thinking you're pregnant so you don't ovulate, I guess.
00:08:03.220 Exactly, yeah.
00:08:03.880 Yeah.
00:08:04.280 And so, absolutely.
00:08:05.780 And, you know, sexual attraction is about reproduction.
00:08:11.140 Yeah.
00:08:11.660 Well, because Gongus Kahn already went through your town and now he's gone. 0.98
00:08:15.960 You've got to find a guy to take care of this thing.
00:08:17.960 Right, right.
00:08:18.460 So it's a different type of, you know.
00:08:20.420 So it's, yeah, so, so absolutely it does, it has that kind of effect.
00:08:24.160 So it affects who you're attracted to, it affects, and I think, again, don't quote me,
00:08:28.540 but I think it was that it makes you more attracted to effeminate men and that sort of thing.
00:08:32.720 Yeah.
00:08:34.340 Which, you know, messes you up when you change your contraception.
00:08:37.320 Yeah.
00:08:37.780 So, yeah, it has effects on all sorts of things. 0.99
00:08:39.820 Oh, shit, I took these vows. 0.98
00:08:41.260 I'm supposed to be here. 1.00
00:08:42.120 I think he's ugly now.
00:08:43.280 Right. 0.81
00:08:45.220 So, yeah, it has huge consequences.
00:08:47.900 And what she says at the end of the book is, look, I'm not against contraception.
00:08:52.220 When I took it for a couple of years, it was the right decision.
00:08:55.120 But I would be very cautious before giving it to a young girl. 0.99
00:08:58.680 I would be especially cautious for putting someone on it for five, ten years.
00:09:02.520 And I think she says something like, I just, you know, if my daughter were going to go on it for five, ten years,
00:09:08.400 I would just really freak out at that sort of prospect.
00:09:11.120 Like, it's something that, it's not to say it's always wrong or we should just get rid of hormonal contraception.
00:09:18.480 Wow.
00:09:19.020 But I don't know what you think on that.
00:09:20.840 Wow.
00:09:20.960 But anyone, whatever they think, anyone should be like, we have to think seriously about what it's actually done to our minds, to our bodies.
00:09:28.640 Thank you.