The Pink Pill Pipeline and the Online War Against Birth Control

View the full episode transcript.

It starts with aspirational lifestyle content about “embracing your femininity,” but ends with alt-right ideology and conspiracy theories about reproductive care. This is the pink pill pipeline — one of the primary ways young women are radicalized online today. Seemingly innocuous content about dating advice, wellness tips, and pop culture leads to increasingly conservative and extremist talking points about how birth control is causing the fertility crisis or how women don’t need to vote. It’s all wrapped up in a glossy veneer of feminine empowerment. Reporter Kylie Cheung joins to discuss how seemingly apolitical content online is shifting the cultural narrative around reproductive rights through coordinated misinformation campaigns, and how to spot pink pill content for what it is.

• Kylie Cheung, staff reporter at Abortion, Every Day

• How Celebrity Smear Campaigns are Inspiring Attacks on Birth Control — Kylie Cheung, Abortion, Every Day
• Far right coming for women’s autonomy; birth control on chopping block — Cassie Miller, Southern Poverty Law Center
• We Need to Talk About the Pink-Pill Pipeline — Jessica Valenti, Abortion, Every Day
• I Caught a Secret Right-Wing Influence Operation Running In My Feed — Emily Amick, Emily In Your Phone
• The Long Campaign to Turn Birth Control Into the New Abortion — Katharine Mieszkowski, Reveal
• Inside Anti-Abortion Groups’ Campaign to Sell Women on Unreliable Birth Control “Alternatives” — Kiera Butler, Mother Jones
• Trump Is Going After Birth Control. Here’s Why. — Mary Ziegler, Politico
• The Trump Administration Is Overhauling Birth Control Access for the Pronatalist Movement — Jessica Washington, The Intercept

Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at [email protected]

Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠ and⁠ TikTok⁠

This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Morgan Sung:  Hello. Do you like these deep dives? Do you want more? Then please rate and review Close All Tabs on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to the show. And tell your friends! Post about it on Instagram, Blue Sky, X, Discord, Reddit, the comments of whatever random recipe blog you’re starting arguments in. Basically, it would be a huge help to get the word out. Okay, let’s get to the show.

If you’re a young woman online, you may have seen posts from Evie Magazine. It has a chic millennial pink logo and taglines like “helping women harness their feminine energy.” Its website features glossy, aspirational photo shoots of women modeling gauzy dresses on the Mediterranean coast, women doing yoga in coordinated pastel workout sets, and women riding horseback through arid Southwestern grasslands. They’re paired with articles like, “What the It Girls Are Wearing in Italy This Summer,” and “Is Your Bra Making You Sick?” 

Kylie Cheung: You probably would not suspect that there’s anything like, quote unquote “political” about this publication at all. 

Morgan Sung: This is Kylie Cheung, the staff reporter for the newsletter, Abortion, Every Day. She’s been covering reproductive health care and women’s rights for years, working at Jezebel and Salon. At first glance, Evie Magazine’s content doesn’t appear that different from the coverage of the publications where Kylie used to work. But push past the surface, and something else emerges. 

Kylie Cheung: You might see their presence on, say, Instagram if you like see a post about celebrity news, then you might follow them or you might go back to their website, and then slowly but surely start to see more content that’s really pushing motherhood, young motherhood, like anti-birth control messages. They describe themselves as like a magazine for celebrating true womanhood and femininity, and as we know all of that has increasingly become kind of this right-wing dog whistle. 

Morgan Sung: If you dig a little deeper into Evie’s website, you’ll find articles on why Love Island actually makes a case against casual sex, how Netflix’s Little House on the Prairie is quote, “The Most Pro-American Show in Years,” and coverage of celebrities who’ve denounced birth control. In fact, Evie publishes at least one anti-birth control article per month, filled with of birth control causing strokes, depression, hormonal chaos, and… bisexuality?

Kylie Cheung: That is such a good one. I remember in like 2022, I was reporting on this influx of TikToks about conspiracy theories that like, my birth control made me gay or this or that. And it’s just like, maybe you were, maybe you’re just gay, which is like, totally cool and everything. And then if something is seen as like unsafe or dangerous that contributes to… a consensus that there should be more restrictions or it should be harder to access, and that is ultimately a right-wing political goal. 

Morgan Sung: Evie Magazine has been hailed as the “conservative Cosmo.” In addition to the digital and print content, Evie also hosts live events and sells raw milkmaid dresses — a play on the far-right raw milk craze and the cottagecore trend that dominated the early 2020s fashion cycle. Oh, and there’s Evie’s FemTech debut — a period-tracking app funded by Peter Thiel that promises to help women wean off of birth control in favor of “natural cycle tracking.” 

Kylie Cheung: If you just say we need to like ban birth control, that isn’t really on its face going to be a popular message, but colluding with kind of this whole “MAHA” and like alternative health scene of pushing for this idea that any amount of like quote unquote “chemicals” and putting this or that in your body, that that is kind of what you might see at a website. Like Evie, that claims to be like an apolitical female lifestyle brand that, you know, isn’t going to overtly say, “We think birth control should be banned,” but is going to kind of push these messages, really questioning and kind of contributing to like, lessening the popularity of birth control. 

Morgan Sung: Welcome to the pink pill pipeline. This is the way young women are radicalized online — through seemingly innocuous content about dating advice, wellness tips, and pop culture — which steers them toward influencers who assure them that giving up their career is an empowering choice… and that caring about politics is for the boys, anyway. And soon enough, extremist talking points about how birth control is causing the fertility crisis, or how women don’t need to vote, don’t feel extreme at all.

And that content, of course, is wrapped in a glossy veneer of feminine empowerment. Today, we’re exploring how seemingly apolitical content online is actually shifting the cultural narrative around reproductive rights — through coordinated misinformation campaigns and aspirational lifestyle posts. And let me tell you, it’s a lot easier to get sucked in than you might think. Ready?

This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist, and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it.

You know how this goes. Let’s open our first tab. What is the pink pill pipeline? 

Kylie Cheung: I think like, end of 2024, when we were seeing all of these conversations come up about how the quote unquote “Manosphere” helped Trump win the election by like, connecting with young men and how he’d gone on all of these like Manosphere-y podcasts. 

[Clip of President Trump on Logan Paul’s podcast from YouTube]: Biden is just so bad. He’s the worst president in the history of our country. You should make a diss track on him. 

[Clip of President Trump on Theo Von’s podcast from YouTube]: Is cocaine a stronger, uh, up? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cocaine will turn you into a damn owl, homie, you know what I’m saying? 

[Clip of President Trump on Adin Ross’s stream from YouTube]: Well, today is going to be the most important stream I’ve ever done. Right in the living room of Mar-a-Lago. And we’ll have a little fun today. Let’s do it. My son Barron says hello, but he’s a big fan of yours. 

Kylie Cheung: Many of them, they’ll have interviewed or endorsed Trump, but they won’t call themselves political. It’s because they draw in and radicalize so many young men precisely by presenting as apolitical, where first, young men might be drawn to their content that’s dating advice, or stuff about MMA fighting, or any number of things that aren’t inherently political, but then just because of how algorithms work, or as you continue to watch their videos or content — eventually they just start saying pretty misogynistic or racist things. 

Morgan Sung: This is an alt-right ideology known as the red pill: the belief that men are disadvantaged in modern society — and that it’s feminism’s fault. Taking the red pill is a nod to this scene in The Matrix — when Neo learns that his entire life is a simulation. Morpheus offers him a choice. 

[Clip of The Matrix from YouTube]: You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. 

Morgan Sung: Incels and self-described “men’s rights activists” have used the metaphor of the red pill to describe “waking up” to their victimhood and resisting “progressive” notions like… women having any agency at all. The manosphere calls for a return to the patriarchal glory of the past. Today, red-pilling is used to describe the way people are radicalized into far-right ideology.

Manosphere content can be wildly misogynistic — but the way young men fall into these online circles is through lifestyle content that appears apolitical: weightlifting, dating advice, style tips. The pink pill pipeline is the other side of this coin. The phrase was coined by journalist Lois Shearing. Her 2025 book, “Pink-pilled,” examines how women are lured into far-right ideology. Just like with red-pilling, pink-pilling also starts with seemingly apolitical lifestyle content. 

Kylie Cheung: Many of these creators or influencers will not overtly identify as Republican agents. They will, in fact, probably reel in young women through content or short-form videos where they talk about celebrity gossip, or maybe they’ll talk about health advice, and eventually get to disparaging and pushing misinformation about birth control. If you’re a young woman and you hate your job, they might give you advice about how to start dating like, a rich man and how you can achieve something akin to like a tradwife lifestyle. 

Morgan Sung: We talked about tradwives in our episode on Mormon momfluencers. They’re women who’ve rejected a modern career path and rely on their husbands to be the breadwinners. Tradwives are supposed to manage the household, do all the chores, take care of the kids, and lead their family’s return to traditional gender roles. Hence, tradwife. Tradwife content was pretty trendy for a while. Videos of baking bread from scratch, homeschooling children, and performing motherhood. But, as it turns out, being a stay-at-home mom, taking care of an entire family on a single income, is not glamorous — it’s hard.

As more horror stories have emerged about the economic precarity of this reality, the tradwife lifestyle has started to lose its appeal. In fact, the most prominent pink pill figures have shifted their messaging away from promoting the tradwife lifestyle — because they know it’s unpopular. Like Emma Waters. She’s a researcher for the Heritage Foundation, the far-right think tank behind Project 2025. Emma Waters has been promoting a middle ground between tradwives and girlboss feminists. But still promoting motherhood above all. 

[Clip of Emma Waters for Fox News from TikTok]: How can we structure what career success and the career trajectory of mothers looks like first, and then build in our career and education to complement that? So maybe women won’t work full-time. About 60% of women say that they would actually prefer to be a homemaker. 

Morgan Sung: But that kind of rhetoric is still divisive. It’s certainly not the soft on-ramp to conservative ideology that lifestyle content is. Celebrity news, for one, is a much more palatable entry point. Take Candace Owens, the far-right political commentator, podcaster, and conspiracy theorist. 

Kylie Cheung: There’s a reason why Candace Owens has her own news platform that’s dedicated to celebrity news when she is like, a politics person. 

[Clip of Candace Owens from TikTok] Personally, I’m starting to wonder if Cynthia is about to steal Ariana from Ethan Slater, which would be some great justice. 

Kylie Cheung: Where you can reel someone in with your cultural takes and eventually build like, this cultural consensus to like a right-wing agenda. 

Morgan Sung: The pink pill pipeline often starts with dating advice. It’s very aspirational. Other young women showing off their luxurious lifestyles paid for by their boyfriends or husbands. You’ll hear buzzwords like “soft life” and “feminine energy” and “princess treatment.” 

[Clip of TikTok user Earth Angel Ariana]: I used to be a tomboy and play basketball, tackle football, and now I just feel like a princess wifey. I just feel like life is so soft and feminine, like men do everything for me. My boyfriend gives me princess treatment all the time. 

[Clip of TikTok user Laila Hakim]: Your man should wanna not only take care of you, but those around you, too. And he’s gonna do without hesitation. That man gets up so fucking fast, like, you won’t even be able to blink before he’s up. 

[Clip of TikTok user Andele Lara]: Girl, I’m in Chicago with my man, and I didn’t book a flight, hotel, or schedule anything. Because a real provider is always going to make time for you. 

Morgan Sung: If you’re a young woman, who’s been grinding in your career and still struggling to make ends meet — much less afford any of these luxuries — and on top of that, dating sucks… then this kind of content is alluring. It’s very easy to get sucked in. 

Kylie Cheung: I think that the success of these different buzzwords and seemingly apolitical trends is that, you know, they spring from these very specific and very real frustrations. A lot of us were just like, set up to be screwed over by the economy as it exists. And I think that in traditional American politics, you hear all the time about frustrated working class men.

But then, I think there is a lot of frustration among the demographic of young women who are also just very exploited as workers and really getting the short end of the stick economically. So that tends to then be catered to in a different way of this content that’s geared toward like, “You could have an amazing life if you just quit your terrible job. Um, your job mistreats and exploits you and all of this is exploitation. And it would actually be empowering if you just quit and married someone and had kids and took care of your kids.” And like, there is a real appeal there. If you hate your job, or if you’re struggling and you’re frustrated in that way. 

Morgan Sung: The word “empowering” is used a lot in pink pill content. 

Kylie Cheung: A lot of these female lifestyle influencers who might not present as anti-feminist, they really will like, couch their specific choices in this performatively feminist language. You could even just see this with something slightly unrelated, but also very related of like vaccine skepticism. It’s like so couched in like, my body, my choice language. 

Morgan Sung: On its face, aspirational dating content doesn’t seem to be anti-feminist or regressive, especially when compared to the overt tradwife videos. But it also opens the door for a quieter, more insidious erosion of women’s agency and relationships. There is this Mormon influencer, Courtney Palmer, who went mega-viral last year for her videos on how to get the “princess treatment.” She talks about how her husband always opens the door for her, and how she rarely ties her own shoes because her husband will do it for her. And how do you secure the so-called provider? Well, Courtney has some advice: 

[Clip of Courtney Palmer from YouTube]: I’m at a restaurant with my husband, I do not talk to the hostess, I do not open any doors, and I do not order my own food. You’re just letting your husband lead and be masculine. He made the reservation, let him do the logistics, you’re just being a princess. 

Morgan Sung: This messaging is particularly effective on young women, because it’s coming from their peers. 

Kylie Cheung: They’re not like, Ted Cruz. They’re not like, you know, these Republican politicians. They’re, like, female lifestyle influencers, they’re young women. 

[Clip of Courtney Palmer from YouTube]: If the waiter addresses you first, I will simply just look at my husband and my husband will order. You don’t need to over speak, over exert yourself. You can be feminine and soft and quiet. 

Morgan Sung: So to recap, here’s how the pink pill pipeline works: you’re a woman in your 20s — you might stumble across a post on Instagram about why Zendaya wants to be a mother. Celebrity news and pop culture is eye-catching. You follow the account. Then, you go on TikTok and see a video from a woman whose life seems so much easier and so much more luxurious than yours. Her fiance pays for everything. She doesn’t have to lift a finger. Who wouldn’t want that? You’re trying to be more active, so you go on YouTube and look up instructional videos for pilates at home.

Then, your social media algorithms start feeding you more content — based on what you’ve already engaged with. More about the soft life. More tips for finding a provider boyfriend. YouTube shorts about the values of young motherhood. Instagram reels about holistic health, and clean living, and detoxifying your diet — which will make you hotter and increase your chances of finding a provider boyfriend. TikToks about why your birth control might be making you sick. 

Kylie Cheung: There are people who aren’t kind of traditionally associated with going after reproductive rights or going after women’s rights. It looks a lot more organic if they’re just seemingly naturally talking about the connections between like, birth control causing infertility, which is not true and is not backed up by anything. And that’s supposedly meaning, giving way to like, the quote unquote, like, “IVF industry” of like, of now that so many women lost their fertility from using birth control, they now need IVF. 

Morgan Sung: Wait, what? Once you’re sucked into the pink pill pipeline, this conspiracy is everywhere. We’re going to get into that in a new tab — after this break. But first, we wanted to remind you that Close All Tabs depends on listeners like you to keep us going. You can support us by becoming a member at donate dot kqed dot org slash podcast. Okay. After the break, the link between the pink pill, misinformation, and the war on birth control. Stick around. Let’s open a new tab: does birth control make you infertile? 

Kylie Cheung: Ugh, I mean no, there’s just like, no… evidence of this whatsoever. 

Morgan Sung: On the internet, there’s this pervasive conspiracy theory that long-term hormonal birth control use leads to infertility, which is somehow funding the modern IVF industry. Like Kylie said, there is zero clinical evidence of this. This is a pretty extreme conspiracy theory, but anti-birth control content is on the rise.

A 2025 study, published in Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, analyzed 100 of the top TikTok videos related to contraception, between August and September 2023. The videos had a collective 4.85 billion views — they were brimming with misinformation about hormonal birth control. Over half of the videos explicitly rejected hormonal birth control, and over a third of the videos recommended natural cycle tracking, without disclosing the limits of it. Only 10% of the videos were created by medical professionals.

This stuff is everywhere online. Here’s what the conversation around birth control looks like right now — and this is on mainstream social media. 

[Clip of TikTok user Casiah West]: Your gynecologist isn’t really telling you how bad birth control is. What’s ironic is, the leading cause of death in women is heart disease. Is it that women are dying from heart disease because of birth control? 

[Clip of TikTok user The Workout Witch]: Birth control is one of the most damaging things you can put in your body, specifically for your body’s biological stress response. 

[Clip of Whatever Pod from TikTok]: If you actually look at the birth control usage rates and divorce rates, they actually perfectly coincide with like a three-year delay. 

[Clip of TikTok user Jay Shetty]: So we’re changing the hormone balance in women in a way that may not be completely reversible. 

[Clip of TikTok user Pretty Politics 101]: Girls that I know who had like the implant in their arm or who have been on the pill for over 10 years cannot get pregnant. Almost like that was the entire point and plan in the first place. 

Morgan Sung: These sensational claims flatten a reality that is complex and nuanced. It’s true that people have wildly different experiences with birth control. Many women have been dismissed, mistreated, and discriminated against by the medical system. Medical misogyny is real, and the history of birth control is steeped in it. The pill was tested on Puerto Rican women, and doctors did dismiss reports of side effects as “psychosomatic.”

Today, a lot of women are still not offered adequate pain management for IUD insertions. There’s no “one-size-fits-all” birth control option, so figuring out what actually works for your body can take a bit of trial and error, which can be especially discouraging when your doctors aren’t listening. I, myself, have had mixed experiences with birth control. Kylie has too. 

Kylie Cheung: I think that you’d be hard-pressed to talk to any woman or any person who uses or has used at different points hormonal birth control, and hear that they had an absolutely flawless, perfect, pain-free experience. Their bodies might not react that well to like, hormonal-birth control pills or any number of different methods. And I think that that is all incredibly valid and can’t be, you know, pushed under the rug.

I think there are just a lot of… difficult realities with our healthcare system, how our medical system treats the experiences and bodies of women or people who use birth control. I think that what you’ll kind of see on social media are kind of these narratives that really tend to flatten that, or just capitalize on the fact that we have these negative experiences to push these different messages about the safety, or effectiveness of birth control, even though… you know, medically speaking, birth control is very safe and very effective.

It’s just that we, as different people with different bodies will have different experiences with it. But I think that, you know, that there’s no room for that kind of nuance in like the kinds of social media posts, and what ends up happening is that like, a lot of storytelling can be taken out of context and then fed into like this right-wing political agenda. 

Morgan Sung: The existing negative experiences that many people have had with reproductive health care means that the cultural discourse is primed to be co-opted by far-right political movements. Like pink-pill dating advice, there are certain buzzwords that raise red flags for Kylie — especially words like “natural” and “cycle tracking.”

Cycle tracking is a perfectly valid form of contraception. Lots of people can’t take hormonal birth control for health reasons and have successfully relied on cycle tracking. But when influencers disparage other forms of contraception and insist on the “natural element” without disclosing that it’s one of the least effective forms of birth control? Red flags. 

Kylie Cheung: What we have is this very, very regressive agenda, but really packaged in kind of this feminist way. And like, if you really, if you like, squint or if you aren’t that educated in these issues yourself, like, sure, it might even sound like it makes sense. 

Morgan Sung: It’s only in the last few years that anti-birth control sentiments have gained so much momentum. We need to talk about when this uptick started. 

Kylie Cheung: I really started noticing and reporting on it specifically around like, 2022, which coincidentally, you know, was the year that the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. 

Morgan Sung: With Roe v. Wade overturned, many far-right religious groups and anti-abortion organizations have a new mission: to make birth control the new abortion. 

[Dasha Burns for NBC News from YouTube]: In the months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Maggie Olivia went to the pharmacy to pick up her birth control prescription. The pharmacists denied her prescription because they were unsure if it was legal, which it was. 

Morgan Sung: Let’s open one more tab: the war on birth control.

Make America Healthy Again — this is the Trump administration’s health initiative, spearheaded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., U.S. Health Secretary and notorious anti-vaxxer. The “MAHA” movement is fueled by skepticism of the pharmaceutical industry. Practices and medications under scrutiny include: childhood vaccine schedules, Tylenol during pregnancy, antidepressants, ADHD drugs. And now, hormonal birth control. 

[Amna Nawaz for PBS News Hour]: Earlier this year, the Trump administration scrubbed CDC guidance on birth control from government websites and froze $65 million in funding to family planning clinics that provide free or low-cost contraception. 

Morgan Sung: The Department of Health and Human Services just overhauled Title X (ten). This is a federal grant program originally designed to help low-income Americans access birth control and other reproductive health care. Kylie said this program has always had bipartisan support, going all the way back to when Nixon signed it into law, over 50 years ago.

But now, according to a funding notice published at the beginning of July, grants funded through the program will, quote, “build body literacy, address infertility, plan and space pregnancies, and navigate reproductive health conditions such as endometriosis.” Contraception is not mentioned, except in a section about “over-medicalization.” Clinics that receive Title X (ten) funding are instructed to promote fertility awareness-based methods — like, natural cycle tracking. 

Kylie Cheung: Some really concerning things have been like, the State Department equating certain forms of birth control and labeling them as abortifacient — and we’ve seen that a couple of times coming directly from this administration, and the goal then being to ban certain birth control or birth control more broadly, in the same way that abortion is banned. We’ve also seen the defunding of Planned Parenthood where like, what the language of that is is to suggest that reproductive healthcare and like, the provision of contraceptives and such isn’t actually health care — is kind of like the language. 

Morgan Sung: Conservatives were not always this critical of birth control. In fact, many were pro-birth control. Back in 2015, Republicans actually introduced a bill to make it even more accessible — by incentivizing drug companies to sell over-the-counter birth control.

Kylie Cheung: I think that there just has been this very sharp right-wing cultural pivot where a lot of this deeply pro-natalist language of human civilization and white Western society is in serious trouble if we don’t have a lot more babies really quick, like a lot of the Elon Musk rhetoric. 

Morgan Sung: Pro-natalism is an ideology that pushes for higher birth rates to combat the supposed “decline of civilization.” Anything that causes people to have more babies is on the table. Can you explain the link between this pro-natalist fear-mongering around falling birth rates and then white supremacist conspiracy theories? What is the great replacement theory that everyone’s freaking out about? 

Kylie Cheung: I think that there is just this inherent link between, you know, panics about the birth rate and racial panics, even though obviously, you know sometimes it’ll be couched in this race-neutral language of just like the human race and declining birth rates there, or the fact that like abortion bans or denying people birth control access will affect people of all races and people of all races might then be forced to like move forward with a pregnancy they don’t want or whatnot. 

Kylie Cheung: It’s impossible to separate this panic from its racist roots. It started with fears of declining birth rates among white women. Kylie said the decline isn’t statistically significant. Experts say it’s likely due to declining teen pregnancy rates. But some extremists on the right claim that birth control is used to suppress white birth rates, in an attempt to replace white Americans as the racial majority. 

Kylie Cheung: There is just this deep tie between pronatalism and white nationalism in that way, just specifically because of how much white nationalism has like embraced pronatalism for its agenda. 

Morgan Sung: In 2022, just months after Roe v. Wade was overturned, UC Berkeley, Mother Jones, and Reveal teamed up for a massive reporting project. They uncovered a years-long social media campaign from anti-abortion groups — to capitalize on wellness trends, promote cycle tracking, and sow distrust in hormonal birth control. Conservative influencers have continued to push birth control skepticism online— often citing outdated or inconclusive research studies to back up their claims. Birth control misinformation continues to thrive on social media. 

[Clip of TikTok user Pretty Politics 101]: Does anybody else find it just a teensy bit coincidental that they pushed birth control on Millennial and Gen Z teenagers so heavily and so early? And now, look at how booming IVF is? 

Morgan Sung: That video has nearly identical wording to countless others. This year, political analyst Emily Amick published a three-part Substack series on the influencer campaign against birth control. She found dozens of Instagram posts from various lifestyle influencers that all had the same caption. They all said, and I quote, “I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that the birth control pill was given out like candy to every female millennial at age 15. And now IVF is a $50 billion industry.” 

Kylie Cheung: Abortion is very politically popular, and so I think even now it’s very interesting that you’ll see the Trump administration has refrained from taking certain moves to directly go after abortion, but has taken all of these many different moves to go after birth control and family planning. And I’ve read certain legal experts suspect as well, is that birth control in some ways is more vulnerable — because it’s increasingly less popular because of how much misinformation there is about it. 

Morgan Sung: Over the last four years, there have been anecdotal reports of young women who’ve discontinued hormonal birth control because of what they see online. This is backed up by a 2024 survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation. 49% of women between 18 and 25 have been served content about birth control on social media. 14% said they made a change to their birth control method or considered a change because of something they heard online. Kylie said, it’ll be decades until we understand the long-term effects of the online campaign against birth control.

It’s easy to dismiss lifestyle content as frivolous and inconsequential. You might see a TikTok from a woman who brags about how her boyfriend pays all of their bills, and think… “It’s not that deep.” You might come across an influencer who questions the safety of IUDs and promotes natural cycle tracking — and it’s tempting to think… “That’s just her choice!” But the pink pill pipeline is real. Content targeted at women is rapidly becoming a vehicle for extremist ideology.

Since Trump’s re-election, concerns about the manosphere have dominated the political conversation. For all of the hand-wringing about bro-y podcasts radicalizing young men, there’s very little discussion about the young women buying into their own oppression. Content aimed at girls is just not taken seriously. That’s part of what makes the pink pill pipeline so effective. It’s the lack of awareness. There’s a political undercurrent to all of these girlish lifestyle videos, but it’s very easy to miss if you’re not already looking for it.

But now, you know what to look for. Before you like a video, or follow an influencer, it’s worth taking a moment to really consider the agenda behind this content. Are they sharing a personal experience with one specific type of birth control? Or are they insisting that all birth control is bad — and that only the method they recommend is natural and healthy? Sure, the romantic date night content is cute, but… is the person posting it also telling you that you need to make yourself quiet and submissive if you want to find a man who’ll pick up the check?

The point is, you don’t have to engage with this content. But, if it comes across your feed, you should be ready to see it for what it is — and then you can keep scrolling. That’s it for our deep dive — but as usual, stick around after the credits for bonus content. And if you’re dying to go further down this rabbit hole, we’ll link to some further reading in our show notes. Until next week, let’s close all these tabs.

Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was produced by Maya Cueva and edited by Chris Egusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music. Additional production help from our intern, Lauren Yoon. The Close All Tabs team also includes editor Chris Hambrick and audio engineer, Brendan Willard. Additional music by APM.

Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our Director of Podcasts, and Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor-in-Chief. Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California Local.

This episode’s keyboard sounds were submitted by Alex Tran and recorded on his white Epomaker Hi75 keyboard with Fogruaden red samurai keycaps and gateron milky yellow pro v2 switches.

This episode includes clips and archive tape from Impaulsive, This Past Weekend with Theo Von, Adin Ross, The Matrix, Fox News, NBC News, PBS Newshour, and TikTok creators @earthangelariana, @ulovelailahakim, @theandelelara, Courtney Palmer, @casiahwest, @theworkoutwitch, @whateverpod, @jayshetty, and @prettypolitics101. Thanks for listening. 

Kylie Cheung: Yeah! Oh my God, now that I’m remembering it, I mean like in 2022, there was just like a viral moment of like a lot of different people theorizing that like, birth control makes you gay. 

Morgan Sung: Yeah, I saw your “birth control makes people a lesbian rumor” piece and I was like, “That’s crazy,” because every lesbian I know says the complete opposite, that they went off the pill and they were like, “I don’t even like men.” 

Kylie Cheung: So fair, yeah.