Inside MAGA influencers’ campaign to scare Arizona women off birth control

As billionaire-backed campaigns flood social media with false claims that the pill is “poison” or an abortifacient, doctors warn the real danger is a spike in unplanned pregnancies that can derail women’s education, careers, and futures.

Ashley St. Clair, a right-wing influencer, has told her 1 million followers on X that hormonal birth control causes suicide and depression.

Elon Musk, the father of her baby son, amplified her disinformation by reposting her message to his 233 million followers.

Katie Miller, wife of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, regularly keeps up the drumbeat against hormonal birth control on her social media. She has declared that birth control is poison for your body and mind to her 194,000 followers on X.

Alex Clark, who calls herself a health and wellness podcaster for conservatives, tells her 726,000 followers on YouTube that they were tricked as teenagers by pediatricians into going on the pill to clear up their “pimples or to alleviate period cramps.”

She claims in multiple videos that the pill increases a young woman’s chances of suffering from anxiety and depression by 80%, that it can mask a woman’s major infertility issues for years, that it changes a woman’s preferences in men, and that it is actually an abortifacient.

An abortifacient is a substance that induces an abortion.

Clark is not a doctor, and neither are Ashley St. Clair or Katie Miller. And not one of the claims they are spreading about the pill has any basis in fact, including the claim that it or any other form of hormonal birth control induces abortions.

They do not.

Nevertheless, Clark, St. Clair, Katie Miller, and numerous other self-proclaimed health and wellness influencers are churning out video and podcast episodes on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, spreading falsehoods about all forms of hormonal birth control.

Family doctors and OB-GYNs in Nevada and around the country tell the Nevadan that they are dealing with the fallout of rampant right-wing social media campaigns to convince American women from their teens through early 30s that the most effective methods of preventing pregnancy—the pill, IUD, and other forms of hormonal birth control—pose a threat to their physical and mental health. 

Unplanned pregnancies can derail education, earning power for women

This misinformation campaign isn’t an accident. Many of its most effective communication agents are bankrolled by ultra-conservative billionaires—usually white men—who believe women should have more children and fully embrace “traditional gender roles.” 

With the support of powerful MAGA-associated organizations, women in the most fertile years of their lives are being persuaded to fear the most effective ways to prevent unwanted pregnancies. 

Their unstated goal appears to be to set off a wave of unplanned pregnancies among young women, who then will continue with the pregnancies, especially if they live in a state where abortion is banned.

Women continue with about 60% of unplanned pregnancies. However, unplanned pregnancies have a major impact on whether young women finish their education.

Sixty-one percent of female students in community college who get pregnant drop out. Thirty percent of teenage girls who drop out of high school are pregnant. Fewer than one in 10 students with children complete a college degree.

Bottom line, according to a 40-year study of 6,000 women: Women who have children early in their careers earn over half a million dollars less, typically, than those who delay children.

So is the long-term goal of these influencers to derail young American women from having the careers, the earning power, and the decision-making they could have had if they did not get pregnant?

Family doctors and OB-GYNs in Arizona and around the country tell The Copper Courier that they are trying to counter the fallout of this tidal wave of highly effective disinformation about hormonal birth control.

The doctors interviewed all agree that the social media war on hormonal birth control is particularly targeting college-age women and women in their 20s and early 30s.

These are women in the most fertile years of their lives, when they need to be the most cautious if they do not want to find themselves accidentally expecting a baby.

Young women told effective contraception is ‘unnatural’

The intrauterine device, known as the IUD, which is inserted into a woman’s uterus, is more than 99% effective at preventing pregnancy and can last for up to 10 years.

The pill is 99% effective as long as a woman remembers to take it every day; 93% if she occasionally forgets.

Other hormonal forms of birth control like the Nexplanon implant are also 99% effective at preventing a pregnancy. The Depo-Provera injection is 95% effective.

Nevertheless, as attractive influencers in their 20s and 30s, speaking with conviction and usually recounting their supposed personal horror stories of being “harmed” by hormonal birth control, flood social media, OB-GYNs are seeing patients every day now who are rejecting hormonal birth control that they have become convinced is “unnatural.”

The trend has become pervasive among her patients who are 14 to about 32 years old in the past couple of years, reports Dr. Bayo Curry-Winchell, the medical director for the Saint Mary’s Urgent Care Group in Reno, Nevada.

“Taking the pill has almost become a bad thing, where you won’t fit in if you are taking it,” among so many in this group, she says. “It’s like a scarlet letter if you decide to take the pill instead of trying natural fertility awareness contraception.”

Dr. Mariko Rajamand, a Reno OB-GYN, tells The Copper Courier that she sees three to five patients a day, typically in their early 20s, who are completely resistant to trying hormonal birth control.

“I have to spend at least 15 minutes in a first appointment with them, just trying to dispel misinformation about what I call ‘hormone modulators.’ Hormonal contraception actually ‘modulates your hormones’ so that’s why I call it that. Young people like that term better too. The phrase ‘birth control,’ is like, ‘cringe’ for them.”

Dr. Rajamand, the founder of FEM Women’s Wellness, explains that young women will tell her that “they ‘just know’ that hormonal birth control is ‘bad’ for their bodies. They don’t want it in their bodies. They think it will increase their cancer risk, lead to infertility, and ‘mess with their hormones.’”

Phoenix-based OB-GYN Dr. Sharon Thompson shares that she regularly sees young women patients who are now skeptical about using effective hormonal birth control—for a multitude of reasons stoked by right-wing influencers.

“There’s been a long-running myth that the pill causes weight gain, but it doesn’t. Another persistent myth is that it will affect a woman’s fertility in the long term. In fact, no hormonal birth control method affects your fertility permanently,” she explains.

“However, recently I had several patients come in and tell me that they feel like their hormonal birth control is changing their personality.”

These are all the exact same talking points pushed by self-described wellness influencers and anti-feminists, including podcaster and known antisemite Candace Owens, who has 5.8 million YouTube subscribers, 6.4 million followers on Instagram, and 6.7 million followers on TikTok.

Owens proudly describes herself as a “full-time wife and mother” who doesn’t believe in birth control.

“People who are anti-autonomy for women are very persistent and they change their tactics. They used to bomb abortion clinics,” points out Dr. Thompson. “Now, they have this new spin that hormonal birth control is changing women’s personalities. But there is no factual basis behind it.”

“When I meet with patients who have these concerns, I tell them, ‘Listen, lots of things can change your personality. When you’re in college and you’re stressed out, your personality is probably a little bit different.”

She continues, “Probably being married changes your personality because you have to adapt to this person who is in your home, who has different ideas and habits than you. If we were interested in keeping our personalities unchanged, we would live alone and we certainly wouldn’t have kids!”

Amid fears surrounding the pill, IUD, and other forms of hormonal contraception, young women are asking their OB-GYNs and family doctors about natural birth control methods.

The natural fertility awareness method of birth control has been promoted by numerous social media influencers and covered extensively in a popular online “conservative Cosmopolitan” magazine for women called Evie.

Evie states that its mission is to help its readers “celebrate their femininity” in all aspects of their lives. That includes marrying young, having a big family, and taking relationship advice from Erika Kirk, the widow of right-wing conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

On the subject of birth control, Evie regularly writes pieces encouraging readers to do a “birth control detox” and to take a holistic approach to birth control.

Pieces like these advise women to reject “toxic” hormonal birth control and switch to natural fertility awareness to prevent pregnancy.

A quarter of women relying on natural fertility awareness get pregnant each year

Natural fertility awareness as a birth control method requires women to take their temperature every morning at the exact same time, check their cervical mucus discharge daily, and chart their menstrual cycle on a calendar or app.

Then they must abstain from sex for at least 11 days of the month, when a woman calculates—as best as she can—that she will be fertile.

Natural family planning, or fertility awareness, fails 22-25% of the time to prevent a pregnancy each year that it is used, according to the National Library of Medicine.

Dr. Bayo says many of her patients who are exposed to the numerous right-wing social media influencers—like Mary Tiles Texas, who has 174,000 followers on X and claims that she feels more energized after going off the pill—come to her convinced that they must try “all natural” birth control. 

“They think that if it’s natural, it’s the safest and most in tune with their bodies. Also, the beautiful packaging on natural fertility awareness kits makes it look 1-2-3-step easy. But the ‘natural method’ takes a lot of consistency,” she warns.

“Plus, our hormones, the way we work, the way we operate, we’re all different. We’re not a one-size-fits-all.”

The doctor, who is a mom of two young daughters, stresses that countering disinformation about hormonal birth control after patients are convinced it is true involves building a “level of trust and comfort” with her patients and letting women know she is not going to judge them. 

“I tell them that I want to be their co-pilot. I lean into curiosity,” she says. 

“I’ll just be curious and ask, ‘What do you know, because I don’t know what you know.’ And we just make it a conversation and I can hit that misinformation in a more targeted way—now I know where a patient is coming from in terms of her hesitancy and concerns.”

To connect women across the country with other doctors who are willing to have these deep conversations, Dr. Bayo established a nationwide directory called Clinicians Who Care. The site lists physicians and medical providers who, like herself and others in this piece, “take the time to listen to and believe in their patients.”

“My role isn’t to convince you to be on birth control pills. What I want to do is talk to you about what are your life goals,” explains Dr. Sharon Thompson.

“What will make your life enjoyable and fulfilling… and if one of your goals is to finish graduate school, to advance your career, or even to build your relationship with the person that you are with, then it may be in your interest in putting off childbearing,” she tells The Copper Courier.

“Birth control pills can help you do that. They’re not the only hormonal birth control method. But if putting off childbearing is right for you, let’s talk about the tools I have to help you do that.”

Dr. Thompson also tells her patients that the methods of birth control that work best are those that require the least work. If a young woman is in college and cannot take her temperature at the exact same time of day before she gets out of bed, then natural fertility awareness is not going to work for her.

If she sleeps in some mornings, she will be “sabotaged,” and if her periods are not “lockstep regular,” then natural fertility awareness is also not going to work to prevent pregnancy.

“It can work well in a very narrow set of circumstances, whereas an IUD works all the time, 24 hours a day,” she says.

Fear of ‘more hormones’ driving birth control hesitancy

Dr. Rajamand agrees that having frank conversations with her patients about natural family planning has proven to be the most successful way to counter propaganda and dangerous falsehoods about hormonal birth control.

She says that she has to work hard to “build trust” with patients who are afraid of hormone modulators (birth control).

“I tell them that my goal is to not to hurt you, it’s to help you. I am going to partner with you. I will never push you to do something that you’re not comfortable with.”

Dr. Rajamand finds that after two to three appointments with patients who do not want to get pregnant but are initially opposed to hormonal birth control—with time between visits so they can reflect on the information she has provided them with—most will accept a form of effective hormone-modulating contraception.

The OB-GYN, who is the mother of three young daughters and a son, admits that helping patients accept reliable contraception on a daily basis is exhausting.

The biggest fear that young women are voicing to their doctors, after listening to influencers who are sometimes linked to anti-abortion or right-wing groups, is that the pill “is pouring” “more hormones” into their bodies.

The doctors interviewed by The Copper Courier say they must explain to their patients that this is not true.

“The idea that ‘hormones’ are harmful is false. Most people, including ‘influencers,’ don’t realize this,” says Dr. Thompson. “When you are using a hormonal method of birth control, if you were to average out the hormones in your body over a month, they are actually less than your ovaries make naturally.”

“That’s why we can use hormonal birth control to treat certain conditions,” she says. “Such as migraines—they can get better if you have them cyclically—or if you have endometriosis pain. We’re actually dialing your system down.”

Adds Dr. Bayo: “The different versions of the birth control pill use hormones—estrogen and progesterone—that you naturally have. Women all have a level of these hormones (naturally).”

“If anything, the pill is just replicating what your body would do naturally to prevent a pregnancy. They’re not ‘pouring’ extra hormones into you.”

She also points out that the hormones—estrogen and progesterone—“aren’t just important to your reproductive health but to your brain health, your gut, and your bones. These are hormones that are vital to you being able to function.”

The right-wing billionaires behind the lies about hormonal birth control

While Nevadan and other OB-GYNs around the country work to provide patients with factual information about effective hormonal birth control, right-wing social media influencers and publications who are spreading disinformation are often doing it for ideological reasons and have support from wealthy conservative individuals or organizations.

Peter Thiel, a right-wing tech billionaire who supports President Donald Trump, is the financier of Evie Magazine. He has also joined forces with the founders of Evie, Brittany Hugoboom and her husband, Gabriel, to launch a menstrual cycle app called 28 Wellness.

The app claims to offer a “cycle-based fitness and wellness experience” with special workouts for each of four supposed phases of a woman’s menstrual cycle.

The 28 Wellness website is filled with photos of tall, white, long-haired, and very slim models lightly running, stretching, and drinking out of coconuts on a tropical island beach, all while showing off their toned but not overly muscled bodies in bikinis and swimsuits.

The site boldly claims in big type that “doctors gaslit us… hormonal birth control promised freedom but tricked our bodies into dysfunction and pain.”

Together with Hugoboom’s Evie Magazine, which publishes stories like “I Thought Career Success Was Everything—Then I Found Balance Through Embracing Traditional Gender Roles,” Thiel promotes a romantic view of women embracing an effortless “traditional” role, spent at home supporting a husband and having babies.

Evie founder Brittany Hugoboom has 335,000 followers on TikTok, 209,000 on Instagram, and 109,000 on X. Evie magazine has 97,000 followers on TikTok, where it can spread this Thiel-backed view of women.

Thiel has spent millions supporting MAGA political candidates including Vice President JD Vance and has also been part of a $200 million investment in building women’s fertility and health care clinics.

Bottom line: The social media influencers promoting natural fertility awareness as the “best” birth control, despite its failure rate of almost 25% a year, are preaching the doctrine of powerful natalists like Thiel, Elon Musk, and JD Vance, who all want American women to have more children.

Natalism promotes the reproduction of human life as an important objective of humanity.

JD Vance has told Americans “I want more babies” and has labeled women without kids “childless cat ladies” who are “miserable.”

Elon Musk, who has fathered 14 children, claims that the declining birth rate is the “biggest danger to civilization.”

The United States recorded its lowest birth rate—1.6 births per woman—in 2024.

Then there is the influential, extremely conservative Heritage Foundation—the think tank that produced Project 2025, which Trump has now implemented despite claiming throughout this 2024 presidential campaign that he had no idea what Project 2025 was.

In January, the Heritage Foundation published its new blueprint designed to convince Americans to have more children, called “Saving America By Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years.”

Heritage wants to “save” the country from a “birth dearth” by encouraging heterosexual men and women to marry young, have lots of children, and embrace traditional gender roles.

Within its pages, the Heritage Foundation blames the proliferation of birth control for “conspiring” to reduce the birth rate.

A leading author of this new blueprint to convince or influence women to have more children is Roger Severino, who was a leader in Trump’s Health and Human Services Department during his first term.

Doctors encourage women to consider personal goals—motherhood or otherwise

Now, OB-GYNs and family physicians across the nation find themselves fighting back against these influential forces as they try—one patient at a time—to help people choose birth control that has a 99% chance of preventing a pregnancy.

That is, if the goal of their patient is to prevent parenthood, at least for now.

“Sadly, billionaires have more money than me and all the other doctors, but I wish they and influencers were held to the same standard of accuracy and scientific validity,” says Dr. Thompson. “They can harness your emotions and misunderstandings. I can’t.

“I must give my patients information that’s limited by evidence and scientific validity… people on social media have no such obligation. They can give you their opinion that they made up in their living room yesterday. TikTok people can make a video and move on.”

Despite the efforts doctors are making to inform patients with factual information backed by scientific studies, they are not always successful in overcoming right-wing propaganda, prettily packaged by influencers, and magazines like Evie.

“It’s unsurprising that there’s misinformation and disinformation surrounding contraception on the internet, but it’s extremely worrisome that it’s being funded by the same anti-reproductive rights groups that are also going after abortion,” says Dr. Alhambra Frarey, the chief medical officer of Planned Parenthood Southeastern Pennsylvania.

“It’s extremely calculating and extremely insidious. Sure, there can be side effects from contraception,” she says. “But these medications have been around for decades and used safely and well tolerated by patients.”

Dr. Frarey also makes an extremely important point that social media influencers ignore when they are spreading lies and myths about the supposed dangers or side effects of hormonal birth control.

“Pregnancy is much more common if you are not on birth control and the (health) risks of pregnancy are much more significant than from any form of contraception!”

The chances of any woman developing a serious health condition are much higher during pregnancy than from taking hormonal birth control, she stresses.

The U.S. has the highest rate of maternal mortality of any high-income country in the world. Twenty-two U.S. women out of every 100,000 die during pregnancy, childbirth, or in the months just after giving birth.

In Canada, it is 8.4 women, and in Great Britain it is 5.5.

That is not something the so-called wellness influencers promoting natural fertility awareness, with its high failure rate, are talking about on social media.

But it is something that American OB-GYNs and family physicians are well aware of when they try their best to provide factual information about hormonal birth control to their patients.

Dr. Rajamand says that she just had six patients under 25 come to see her. Two had IUDs and the other four refused birth control completely.

“I hate to tell women this, but the truth is that biology and Mother Nature says that we are going to reproduce. If you go based on Mother Nature, you are going to get pregnant a lot.”

Rajamand believes that “the greatest liberating thing for women in our history of human culture has been birth control.”

“Thankfully, society says that we’re worth more than just as baby producers,” she says. “That we have more value. So the war on birth control is a very unfortunate thing for us.”