The Birth Control Deception (2026)

New Book by Unbekoming

In January 1975, A. H. Robins’ own microbiological research director outlined four experiments to determine whether the tail string on the Dalkon Shield was wicking bacteria into women’s uteruses. Two and a half weeks. Four rabbits. Ninety dollars.

The company did not fund the experiments.

A. H. Robins was earning nearly $70,000 per day. It had distributed 4.5 million Shields across eighty countries. At least eighteen women were already dead. Hundreds of thousands had suffered pelvic infections, septic abortions, and permanent sterility. Four years earlier, a quality control supervisor had demonstrated a fix — sealing the string’s open end with a cigarette lighter. Five to ten cents per device. The company sold each Shield for up to $4.35.

Ninety dollars to find out whether the string was killing women. They chose not to know.

What happened next — the delayed recall, the document destruction during active litigation, the courtroom strategy of interrogating injured women about their sexual histories, the absence of criminal prosecution for any executive — follows a sequence that repeats, product after product, across sixty years of medical devices and drugs marketed to women.

The Book

The Birth Control Deception: What the Manufacturers Know and Women Are Never Told is approximately 84,000 words. It collects twelve original essays, two book summaries, a compilation of reader testimonies, and an essay on fertility awareness, with a new introduction and three new appendices written for this volume.

What’s Inside

The prescribing insert essay may be the most important piece in the book, because it uses no sources outside the manufacturers’ own documents. It reads the labels for Yaz, Sprintec, Apri, Junel Fe, and Aviane — five of the most commonly prescribed oral contraceptives in America — and organises what they say into three categories. What they acknowledge: blood clots, cancer associations, depression, suppressed sexual desire. What they admit they don’t know: “the effect of long-term use of the oral contraceptives with lower formulations of both estrogens and progestogens remains to be determined.” And what they never studied: the adolescent brain, cognitive development, partner selection, relationship satisfaction, discontinuation effects. The Junel label states that its pharmacokinetics have not been characterised. The Aviane label admits that no specific investigation of its bioavailability in humans has been conducted. These are drugs taken daily by millions of women. The labels have been available inside every box since the day each prescription was filled.

Other essays trace individual products. Depo-Provera — rejected three times by the FDA for causing cancer in laboratory animals, then approved after the agency changed its testing requirements to exclude the animal models that produced the cancer. Meanwhile, 14,000 women at Grady Hospital in Atlanta had been given the drug without informed consent, and several had died. NuvaRing — safety trial of sixteen women, four with dangerous hormone spikes, data deleted from the FDA submission, temperature stability never tested after the ring leaves the factory. The Dalkon Shield — the full documentary record, from internal memos to sworn depositions. Breast implants — sixty years from Dow Corning’s knowledge of silicone toxicity in 1954 through the postapproval studies of 99,993 patients that showed eight-fold increases in Sjögren’s syndrome, after which the FDA questioned its own data collection process. Hormonal IUDs, the copper IUD, subdermal implants — each examined through its own prescribing documents and the evidence those documents omit.

The reader testimony essay documents what happened when women responded to the first published piece. A nurse reported that eight of ten colleagues had unexplained infertility. Women described meeting partners on the pill and losing attraction when they stopped. Others had been prescribed antidepressants to manage pill-induced depression — pharmaceutical layers no one had studied in combination. These patterns do not appear in any clinical trial, because the trials were not designed to find them.

Two book summaries — Sarah Hill’s This Is Your Brain on Birth Control and Jolene Brighten’s Beyond the Pill — provide the neuroscience and clinical recovery frameworks. Each includes thirty questions and answers and a deep-dive conversation for paid subscribers.

The book closes with an essay on Toni Weschler’s Taking Charge of Your Fertility and the symptothermal method — 99.4% effective with correct use, matching the pill, absent from medical school curricula. There is no money in teaching women to read their own bodies.

The Appendices

The appendices are new material. They are the reason this book exists as more than a collected edition of published essays.

Appendix A is twenty-three questions to bring to a doctor’s appointment, organised by product — the pill, Depo-Provera, IUDs, implants, NuvaRing. Each question is grounded in evidence from the essays, and each has a factual basis a doctor can either answer or cannot. The appendix closes with red flag responses — the phrases that signal informed consent is not happening.

Appendix B takes the manufacturers’ own admissions from the prescribing labels and reorganises them: what they acknowledge, what they admit they don’t know, and what was never studied. Everything in it comes from the companies’ own documents. It is the appendix to hand to someone who says “but the FDA approved it.”

Appendix C is a quick-start guide to the symptothermal method of fertility awareness. The three signs, how they work together, what you need, who should not rely on it. The equipment required is a thermometer.

Why a Book

These essays were published individually over months. Read in sequence, they show something that no individual essay can: the same pattern — suppress, market, delay, settle — running across different products, different companies, different decades. The Dalkon Shield in 1970 and the copper IUD still on the market today follow the same sequence. The pattern does not emerge from any single essay. It emerges from reading them together.

The Birth Control Deception is available now for paid subscribers, alongside the full library of my other books. If there is a young woman in your life about to be handed her first hormonal prescription, this is the book to give her before that appointment.

If you’re already a paid subscriber, the PDF is below. If you’re not, it will appear here once you upgrade.