As counterintuitive as it sounds, if you’ve spent a significant amount of your life before trying to conceive taking a birth control prescription, you may have already given your fertility a helping hand.
Birth control and fertility
There is evidence that oral contraceptives like “the pill” can help protect you against uterine and ovarian cancers, both of which could harm your fertility, and can lessen the effects of endometriosis.
Up to 50% of women with endometriosis may experience infertility, due to scar tissue build-up, changes to hormones, or eggs affected by the uterine tissue that is growing outside the uterus. The pill limits estrogen, which endometriosis needs to expand, so endometriosis that has been limited by the pill for a while generally doesn’t grow as much, spread as far, or cause as much internal scarring.
Unfortunately, if you weren’t already on a hormonal oral contraceptive, there’s nothing you can really do about it now. On the other hand, some women notice a decrease in fertility after coming off of the birth control pill, but this only happens to a small percentage of people. The most important thing you can do now, whether you were on hormonal birth control or not, is to exercise, eat right, and get yourself into the best baby-making shape possible.
