What 200 Gen Z Women Told Me About Birth Control Should Alarm Every Woman in America

A survey of young women reveals how online misinformation, not politics, is quietly dismantling trust in contraception.

Birth control is the single most powerful tool for women’s economic mobility and autonomy in modern history.

It changed everything: When women could plan if, when and with whom they wanted to have children, college enrollment soared, dropout rates fell and poverty rates declined. The ability to access contraception has been directly tied to women’s ability to stay in school, build careers and make decisions about their own futures.

So why, in 2025, are we finding ourselves in a messaging war on birth control?

I’ve been fascinated—and honestly, horrified—by what feels like the next frontier in the fight for reproductive rights: the calculated war on contraception. While we are busy defending our access to birth control in state legislatures and even U.S. Congress, the real fight right now is happening online, on podcasts, in algorithmic feeds and through influencers disguised as ‘wellness advice.’

I wanted to learn more. 

At first, I set out to prove a simple theory of mine: that political affiliation might correlate with whether young people in college are using contraception. I assumed Democratic-leaning students would overwhelmingly be using birth control, and conservative students might abstain. 

I was wrong. 

It is not about what party or political belief system they follow—it’s about who they follow online.

I sent out a survey across 26 states—through sorority group chats, campus clubs and anyone who would respond to my DMs—and heard back from over 200 students aged 18-22.

Here’s what I found: 

• 74 percent of respondents identified as Democrats—consistent with what we know about young college-aged women’s politics.
• 62 percent of respondents said they weren’t on any form of birth control.

And when asked where they were getting their information? The words “online” and “social media” appeared 70 times in their answers.

This wasn’t what I expected. This wasn’t about partisanship.

Young, educated women—across party lines—are opting out of using birth control. Not because of religion. Not because of politics. But because of the internet.

It is not about what party or political belief system they follow—it’s about who they follow online.

Over the course of the last 10 years, misinformation around contraception, and specifically birth control, has flooded the internet. 

The Subtle Misinformation Pipeline

Scroll through TikTok long enough and you’ll see it: influencers warning that “birth control ruined my hormones,” or wellness coaches promoting cycle tracking as a “natural” alternative to the pill. These videos might look harmless—or even empowering—but a recent study from La Trobe University found that over 70 percent of contraceptive content on TikTok is misleading or false.

Researchers reviewed the top 100 videos on contraception, with nearly 5 billion views.

• 53 percent of creators rejected hormonal birth control outright.
• 34 percent expressed distrust in medical professionals.
• Only 10 percent were made by actual health experts.

In other words: The majority of what young women see online about birth control isn’t evidence-based—it’s algorithm-optimized.

And while some misinformation is organic, a shocking amount of it is part of a coordinated political messaging campaign we can’t turn away from. 

… Over 70 percent of contraceptive content on TikTok is misleading or false.

Why It Matters

This messaging campaign is intentional, professional and strategically timed to help build broad public support for one larger end goal: eliminating access to contraception in America.

Today, 121 million Americans—over one-third of the country—live in states actively restricting or attempting to restrict contraception. And while lawmakers push bills to roll back access, the online ecosystem softens the ground, normalizes distrust, and makes young women believe opting out is an empowered choice rather than a politically engineered one. 

It’s a perfect storm:

• Influencers normalize distrust in medical care.
• Politicians push restrictions that make it harder to access birth control.
• Courts set up the legal groundwork to strip away the right to contraception altogether.

The result? 

Millions of young people have already opted out of care due to a large-scale misinformation campaign. So when the legal attacks come, the backlash is smaller due to a culture war that worked first.

The Men Behind the Curtain of the Anti-Birth-Control Movement

In 2022, Justice Clarence Thomas called for revisiting Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court case that guaranteed the right to birth control. 

We’ve even seen tech billionaires like Elon Musk use their massive platform of 225 million followers and the algorithm he personally owns—to push the alarming idea that birth control is to blame for feminism, or that women voting Democrat is a “problem” linked to contraception. 

The self-proclaimed conservative Cosmopolitan—Evie magazine—built a fertility tracking app to accompany their smear campaign against contraception. Evie has spent the past few years promoting misinformation on everything from COVID-19, the LGBTQ+ community, feminism and, notably launching a large-scale misinformation campaign against hormonal birth control. They’ve called it harmful, unnatural and unnecessary, using “wellness” language to mask a full-blown disinformation campaign targeting young women.

They launched a fertility-tracking app called 28—a “wellness-forward” tool as an alternative to birth control to help users naturally track and manage their cycles. The app encourages users not to use birth control and asks that users input their menstrual data and details around their last cycle date, where they live and more. The apps primary financial backer is Peter Thiel, the founder of Palantir, one of the most powerful surveillance software companies in the world.

The New Age of Risk

Part of why this campaign is landing so effectively is because today’s teens and young adults live in a world where teen pregnancy is less relevant. 

Teen pregnancy has declined 78 percent since 1991—thanks overwhelmingly to access to contraception. But because these fears feel far away, misinformation feels low-stakes. Until it isn’t.

It’s all working. 

When 62 percent of the young women who completed my survey aren’t on birth control—even though nearly three-quarters identify as Democrats—this stops being a partisan story and becomes something much scarier:

The anti-contraception movement has broken through the political firewall.

The cultural messaging is strong enough to make Democratic-leaning young women suspicious of basic healthcare, then the political opposition to contraception bans will be significantly weaker when the legal fight comes.

They don’t need to win a majority.

They need to suppress outrage.

And they’re doing it by reshaping belief systems before policy even hits the floor. The battleground isn’t left vs. right. It’s an online ecosystem vs. reality.

The most powerful messaging machines of our time—algorithms, influencers, billionaires and political operatives—are working together to seed distrust in birth control as a Trojan horse for dismantling access to contraception altogether. We have to pay attention.