In January 2023, an article by New York Post columnist Rikki Schlott surveyed a striking trend: a growing wave of young women opting out of hormonal birth control. The writer herself is one such malcontent. “Recently, after six years on it, I decided to stop taking the pill,” she says. “But it isn’t just me. Many of my friends are independently doing the same, whether it’s driven by concern for their mental health, desire for something more natural—or curiosity about what the world looks like when you’re not in a hormonal fog.” She argues that an increasing number of her peers are declining oral contraception because they have “an intuitive sense that hormonal birth control might be messing with us, and our brains.”