Dr. Tabatha Barber explains that birth control pills suppress your body's natural hormone production rather than regulate it. Long-term use can disrupt the communication between your brain and ovaries, leading to absent, scant, or irregular periods after you stop taking them.
The birth control pill does not regulate your hormones. That is a myth. It shuts down their production completely and overrides the system. And so what we have come to realize is that you're on this for 5, 10, 15 years, and you try to come off of it. Sometimes the brain and the ovaries, they don't talk to each other when you come off of that pill, because that system has been down for so long, they don't even know how to communicate. And so often, women will come off the birth control pill and not have a period, or they'll have just scant bleeding here and there, or it's super irregular. And what's happening is your brain and your ovaries don't know how to communicate properly. They don't know how to respond to each other. And so you're not getting a consistent, regular cycle.
