The monthly bleed on the pill is a 1950s marketing gimmick - you’re allowed to skip it by Kanika Welch
"The monthly 'period' you experience on the pill is a marketing decision made by men in the 1950s to sell #contraception as socially acceptable to the Pope and the Vatican. Now, in 2026, governments are making the pill the walk-in default, and it is no longer the best choice for many women."
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"Think about that. For sixty years, hundreds of millions of women have organised their lives around monthly cramping and bleeding that serves no biological purpose, because of a marketing calculation made by men trying to placate a Church most of them didn’t answer to. And the trials that got #ThePill to market in the first place carry their own uncomfortable history: large-scale testing was run in Puerto Rico from 1956 on women told little about the experimental nature or risks of what they were taking. #BodilyAutonomy is the whole story of the pill - who had it, who didn’t, and who decided."
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"The uncomfortable clinical truth is that the pill is not our most effective contraceptive, or the most convenient. Long-acting reversible contraception (#LARC), ie. the #IUD and implant, is. LARCs are more than 99.7 per cent effective, can’t be forgotten at 7am, and are recommended as first-line across the reproductive lifespan. Yet only about 11 per cent of Australian women use one, versus more than 30 per cent across the UK and much of Europe. The biggest reason more women don’t use the most effective contraception is that nobody ever sat them down and offered it."
https://cheekmedia.substack.com/p/the-monthly-bleed-on-the-pill-is