Dr. Mary Claire Haver

All the side effects people talk about, they're like, it's going to affect my mood.

It's going to affect my clotting.

It's going to affect this.

And like all of those things are a hundred times worse if you get pregnant and these medications work to prevent that.

And they have many other benefits.

So I am not an anti-birth control person at all.

But what I do think is important is distinguishing the two.

between natural estradiol and ethanol estradiol because it gets confused, especially when we talk about menopause.

So there actually is one.

In Europe, correct?

In Europe.

And I wrote an article actually about it because there was an article that was published comparing, it's a 17-beta estradiol, and it has a specific type of progestin.

We'll talk about what that means in terms of the other component of it that they think was going to be better for sexual side effects.

So they compared the sexual side effects of this pill to the worst offender when it came to sexual side effects of the traditional birth control pill.

Mm-hmm.

And I wrote an editorial about it because that's apples to oranges to compare these two.

But the reason that we don't have it here, one, is that the regulatory environment around birth control is a little bit different.

There are different types of birth controls in Europe.

But the big side effect of that medication is abnormal bleeding.

Bleeding.