It’s quite normal for women to have birth control pills prescribed as a teenager Whether it’s for actual birth control or to treat hormonal imbalance conditions like: acne, PCOS, endometriosis and irregular, painful or heavy periods, it’s very common for women to start taking the pill as teenagers and keep taking them long term into their thirties.
This might seem fine and normal, but when the time comes and you want to get pregnant, that’s when things can get tricky.
The way that the combined pill works is that during the placebo week, estrogen and progesterone levels fall, triggering a withdrawal bleeding or fake period. That’s why when you’re on the pill you get your period every month, making you think you have a regular cycle and everything is in order.
When you stop taking the pill, that controlled hormonal environment goes away, and the hormonal imbalances and symptoms you had as a teenager come back.
The truth is the pill never fixed why your hormones got imbalanced in the first place, it just created a fake environment that hid those symptoms. Because most people stop taking the pill hoping to get pregnant very soon, and those hormonal imbalances haven't been solved, it’s hard for them to get pregnant and in some cases women may present infertility, like some PCOS cases.
On the other hand some women that start taking the pill only for birth control purposes, develop hormonal imbalances meanwhile they are taking it without them even knowing it.
Just as with people who started with those issues, a lot of the symptoms are masked as long as they're on the pill, only to discover they’re infertile or have hormonal imbalances when they leave the pill and try to get pregnant.
So I want to create awareness and encourage you to take care of your fertility before wanting to have kids or before it is too late. Nobody tells us this stuff and there are so many cases of women in their early 30’s wanting to have kids and they realize they have problems. The problem of not taking care of this before you want to have kids is that a fertility specialist will not help you if you haven't been trying to get pregnant for at least 1 year if you are younger than 35 or 6 months if you’re older (that is the definition of infertility). If the clock is ticking for you, waiting that amount of time might sound quite scary and on many occasions people that want to have 2 or 3 kids are only able to have 1, only with the help of IVF or other intervention just because they don’t have enough time or because their odds are too bad.
So I want to encourage you to check your fertility, leave the pill in a responsible way, taking care of not getting pregnant if that is what you want and taking care of the nutritional deficiencies that the pill creates. Check your fertility and your hormones and if they are not in range get your hormones in balance with the help of a professional that knows about nutrition and lifestyle changes, so when you actually want to have kids you know everything is ok.