Evie Magazine's Founder Responds To The Washington Post: Stop Gaslighting Women Suffering From Hormonal Birth Control

Lauren Weber, you should be ashamed that you, as a woman, are contributing to the mass gaslighting and dismissing of women’s horrible experiences on birth control. I’d say you are out of touch and uninformed at best, but you’re also directly complicit in TikTok censoring and removing viral videos of women speaking out.

Before I address the article, I’d like to address the journalists and reporters from virtually every legacy media company who follow my accounts: You often lament why people don’t trust the media anymore.

Your lack of self-awareness is astonishing. You are a perfect example of why people hate and distrust legacy media. You deceive and bait, as you did to influencer Nicole Bendayan for this article (I have the receipts), and go in with your story pre-determined.

That’s not honest reporting, and it’s certainly not journalism. Reporters used to care about the truth, wherever it would lead them. They used to believe in speaking truth to power. Now, you attack the people on behalf of the powerful. You are propagandists, blinded by your own politics.

Women’s health is not a political issue. It is a health issue.

Women’s health is not a political issue. It is a health issue. The government has no business interfering with our personal health.

In case you needed a reminder, our healthcare system is broken, we are one of the unhealthiest, most obese countries on earth, our food industry prioritizes profits at all costs, including putting countless toxic, disease-causing ingredients in our food that are banned in places like Europe, and the regulatory agencies are essentially controlled by pharmaceutical companies.

It’s exhausting yet predictable to see reporters incapable of keeping politics out of health. A short time ago, we all laughed at headlines calling fitness and working out “far right.”

The problems with hormonal birth control have been studied, documented, and reported on extensively. They’re not even disputed by the manufacturers who put the laundry list of warnings in the packaging.

Why do legacy media companies refuse to accept this? Like most things, it probably gets down to money.

Maybe you’re simply part of their multi-billion dollar PR campaign to try to save hormonal birth control. But you can take this one to the bank: Women want out of their toxic relationship with birth control. They’re no longer afraid to speak up. The mass exodus will continue. We called this years ago.

And as my team mentioned in an email to you, which you predictably left out of your piece (although referenced some of my points without crediting), I’ve long championed the publishing of important subjects that impact women's lives, regardless of whether those subjects are deemed taboo or "off limits."

This includes 1) the racist origins of the birth control pill; 2) the women who were abused (and died) during trials without informed consent; 3) the fact that only men testified at the Nelson pill hearings about its safety and effects; 4) the proven damage the birth control pill has done to women's bodies; and 5) how it can alter brain chemistry and influence the choice of sexual partners.

Why are so many women being dismissed and gaslit by their doctors to such a degree that they have to turn to social media to get answers?

The questions you should be asking are: Why are so many women being dismissed and gaslit by their doctors to such a degree that they have to turn to social media to get answers from other women sharing their lived experiences? And where can women turn to for reliable alternatives to hormonal birth control? But instead, you’ve decided to blame and shame the victims in all this – women.

I’m reminded of another recent time when you shamed and dismissed countless women who reported that their periods were being negatively affected by the Covid-19 vaccine.

I was slandered and labeled a “conspiracy theorist spreading misinformation” because the media company I founded was the first women’s publication that broke the story about the vaccine affecting menstrual cycles.

How did we know it was happening? Because we actually listened to thousands of women. We didn’t tell them, “That’s not happening to you.” And it turns out, we were right. It’s now an indisputable fact that the Covid vaccine – among many of its issues – was negatively affecting women’s menstrual cycles.

This may surprise you, but you can actually report that women are having negative effects without being anti-vax. Similarly, you can acknowledge the very real downsides of hormonal birth control and criticize doctors for failing their female patients without being “anti-birth control.”

You accuse women who are sharing personal experiences of fear-mongering, yet that is all you do. The difference is, our concerns are rooted in the reality of what the pill can actually do to your body and brain, whereas yours are entirely political.

Your hope is that you can discredit the millions of women getting off it, while discouraging the millions more who will follow suit, by trying to say it’s somehow a “scary right-wing thing.” That’s absurd.

Especially since, for decades, distaste for hormonal birth control and an awareness of its negative effects was a crunchy, liberal position. Ask any girl in Los Angeles who eats clean and has a great body. I would know. Many of them are my friends. In reality, the reason this exodus is happening is because it has everything to do with the health of our bodies, and health alone.

Women are on TikTok looking for answers because their doctors are failing them. This is a failure of epic proportions by the American medical establishment. That’s the story.

You are on the wrong side of history censoring and silencing women for speaking up.

Following the publication of The Washington Post's article, TikTok removed “Toxic Breakup,” our Birth Control Detox, from the app – after they guaranteed its approval ahead of launch and even committed to boosting it across the app. The WaPo “journalist” in the article bragged about having a hand in taking down Brett Cooper's video and multiple videos from another TikTok influencer on birth control for misinformation.

I encourage TikTok to read the comments on The Washington Post's Instagram article post. Women are overwhelmingly furious by their gaslighting piece. They shut off the comments! You are on the wrong side of history censoring and silencing women for speaking up. WaPo didn’t interview a single renowned researcher on the subject like Dr. Sarah Hill. Instead, they interviewed a male doctor who has never and will never take hormonal birth control or know its effects personally – disgraceful. I’ve been very vocal in defending TikTok from being banned by the government. I hope they reverse this swiftly.

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