Science

"The Pill" may be negatively impacting and altering women's mental lives.

The authors of that study explained how hormonal birth control appears to shrink an important region of the brain, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, that’s associated with fear and emotional processing more broadly.

In our study, we show that healthy women currently using COCs had a thinner ventromedial prefrontal cortex than men.

This part of the prefrontal cortex is thought to sustain emotion regulation, such as decreasing fear signals in the context of a safe situation. Our result may represent a mechanism by which COCs could impair emotion regulation in women.

What the researchers found was that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex in women who were currently using COCs was significantly thinner compared to men.

Interestingly, this reduced thickness was not observed in women who had discontinued use of COCs in the past. This suggests that the behavioural changes may be reversible if use of the Pill ceases.

The possibility that this thinning effect might be reversible is the only potential silver lining to this study, which otherwise suggests that the Pill really may be having profound effects on the behaviour of the tens of millions of women—and hundreds of millions worldwide—who take it.