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Comment by rr808 | Hacker News Reader

Its fascinating that the pill can also change the type of male women are attracted to. Given it is so ubiquitous it can completely change society and evolution. (Of course the falling birthrate is hugely changing society as well)

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You should have been there when teenage girls were first allowed to become ambitious to consume the early formulas, saturating them with much higher levels of female hormones than pills ever since.

https://www.npr.org/2020/05/09/852807455/how-the-approval-of...

Is this the link you meant to include? The article doesn’t mention the changes in dosage in young women at all…

Also all of the plastic

And exogenous hormones.

It's likely to have increased divorce rates - theoretically, women will be on the pill whilst single, get married and want to have children and then when they come off the pill, they'll find different people attractive. Unfortunately it's difficult to distinguish this hypothetical effect from social factors which lead to people taking in the pill in the first place, so correlation studies must be almost impossible to do correctly.

EDIT: Looks like I might be completely wrong (although the caveat about hidden variables stands):

"But an even bigger positive is what comes when we look at the divorce rate. Despite the whole my-sex-life-is-meh-and-I-am-not-that-attracted-to-my-partner thing, women who chose their partners when they were on the pill were significantly less likely to divorce than women who chose their partners when they were off it."

https://behavioralscientist.org/quality-sex-relationships-bi...

There's a lot more detail in the link.

I mean, it’s a “birth control” pill, so the birth rate falling is probably not an unintended consequence

It seems to me the intention was to allow women to choose when to have children, not to forgo the process of reproduction entirely and plunge our species into extinction-level birth rate falling off a cliff!

But, by giving the choice of when, many will choose never.

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