Doctors Told Aubrey Plaza Birth Control Caused Her Stroke At 20: "I Never Took It Again"

In a 2024 interview clip from The Howard Stern Show, Aubrey Plaza recounted a terrifying and life-altering incident during her time at NYU. At just 20 years old, she experienced a stroke that left the left side of her body paralyzed, albeit briefly. The potential culprit, she believes, was birth control.

Howard Stern opened the conversation with a question about her stroke. “You’re at NYU, you’re about to start your life, and you had a stroke. And very few, I don’t know how old you were at that point, what, 20?” he asked. "Somehow, all of a sudden, the left side of your body was paralyzed. And I can’t imagine at 20 what that must be like.”

Plaza’s response was both unsettling and eye-opening. “It was really a freak thing, honestly. I think they blame, you know, my doctors blamed it on the birth control pill at the time because I had kind of been on like a new one or something for a couple of months,” she said. “It was really the only thing I was putting into my body. And so I never took that again, ever.”

What made Plaza’s stroke even more surreal was its suddenness. “The craziest thing about it was, and kind of the coolest thing about it is like, when it happened mid-sentence,” she continued. “I took the train to Astoria to have lunch with my friends, and I walked into their apartment and just in mid-sentence, like I hadn’t even taken my jacket off. And like in mid-sentence, it just happened. And that’s when I was paralyzed, but really only for like a minute or something.”

She added, “I lost my motor skills really briefly. But then the freakiest thing was that I forgot how to talk. But the thing that you realize when you have a stroke, or that some people might have a stroke, might realize is that you start to understand that your brain is not you.”

Plaza’s reflection on the disconnect between her conscious self and her malfunctioning brain was profound. “There was me, and then there was my brain that was malfunctioning. And that was the moment that I had where I went, whoa, whoa, whoa. How am I conscious that my brain can’t say these words when me as me knows what the answer is?”

The actress recounted a specific moment with the paramedics: “They’re asking me questions. And me as me, whatever that is, soul me, higher me, whatever me is, was going, the answer is yogurt. They’re going like, what’d you have for breakfast? And I’m going in my head, say yogurt, brain, say the word yogurt. And I couldn’t do it.”

“I thought I’d never speak again, but it was also kind of like, oh, wait a minute, there’s more going on here because I’m watching my brain malfunction.”

How many women are fully informed of the potential for strokes, blood clots, or other severe complications? And how often are their concerns dismissed when they raise red flags about their health?

Statistics paint a sobering (and frightening) picture: Women experience adverse reactions to medication at nearly twice the rate of men, and 80% of new prescription drugs are pulled from the market due to unexpected side effects in women. Add to that the diagnostic delays, for over 700 conditions, that women face because their symptoms are often trivialized. It’s no wonder there’s a growing mistrust in the medical system.

Plaza’s experience, and her doctors’ candid acknowledgment that birth control may have been the cause, is a step in the right direction. But transparency shouldn’t come only after the fact. Women deserve honest, upfront discussions about the medications they’re prescribed, especially when those medications come with serious risks.

It’s time to ask: When will doctors stop dismissing women’s concerns as hysteria or overreaction? When will they listen, believe, and act with the urgency these situations demand? Plaza’s story is one of resilience and self-awareness, but it shouldn’t take a life-altering event for women to be heard.

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