Davina McCall’s Pill Revolution starts in the most perfect way: McCall, dressed up like a gameshow host, is spinning a roulette wheel.
On it are a list of symptoms that women might experience on the pill. Mood swings, nausea, bleeding: check, check, check. They’re all there. And next to her are the ‘contestants’: three stuffed guinea pigs.
“Endless possibilities! Everything from pretty bothersome to completely debilitating”, McCall says chirpily.
If it’s a tad on the nose, that’s easily forgiven: the pill, like the menopause, remains one of the most mysterious aspects of women’s health. Many of us (myself included) are inducted into this brave new world as teenagers, a pack of contraception slapped into our hands after a brief five-minute consultation. We’re then left to get on with things.
But the fun (as McCall explains) is only just beginning. What follows for many is often a rollercoaster of repeat doctor’s appointments, confusing internet research, and switching between pills, implants, patches and coils, praying that one of them won’t set off an avalanche of side-effects.
The point of this documentary is – like McCall’s previous piece on the menopause – to spark a conversation about just how little women know about the stuff they’re putting into their bodies. Over the course of forty years, almost eighty per cent women will switch contraceptive methods; more than half will switch more than once. Does it really need to be this way?
This is a massive subject (perhaps too massive for an hour-long show), but McCall tackles the subject with wild enthusiasm. In addition to interviewing support groups, women’s health start-ups (of which there are lamentably few) and charities, she takes the jaw-dropping step of getting her coil changed live on screen, prompting winces of sympathy from every woman at the screening I attended.
She’s also admirably open about her own journey with contraception: starting out on Microgynon, a pill that was around in the 60s and is still being prescribed to young women today (regardless of the fact that newer, better options exist) she moved onto the coil in her twenties.
It works for her, she says – but as the young women she interviews make abundantly clear, it doesn’t work for everyone, and on the internet, misinformation is rife. And to make things worse, access to contraception is as bad as it’s ever been in the UK: in one jaw-dropping set of statistics, some women in parts of the country are waiting up to a year to get a coil fitted. And you wonder why the rate of abortions is also going up.
The climax (or perhaps nadir) of the episode comes when she sits down with the Minister for Women, Maria Caulfield, in an interview that makes the mouth pucker like a cat’s behind. As Caulfield explains, £25m has been put aside by the government to fund Women’s Health Hubs: places where women can get access to contraception, family planning, whatever they need.
All very good in theory, but McCall isn’t buying it. “This all sounds great, but how long’s it going to take? Because women are desperate.”
Ten years, apparently. And as for the funding? As she puts it, “when you’ve cut a billion pounds from health and lots of that would have been used for sexual and reproductive health, putting £25m back in, it feels like a drop in the ocean.”
All very true, and the government is offering little in the way of answers. The key to change, you realise as the documentary goes on, lies with women: the women breaking taboos to talk about their struggles with contraception; the women doing genetic research to evaluate how it affects our bodies; the women running websites where others can find useful, up-to-date information on what kinds of contraception are actually available to them on the NHS.
But it’s not just up to women. At the end of the screening I attended, McCall stood up and proclaimed that the (male) journalist sitting next to her had been left gobsmacked by the whole thing.
As she told it, he had no idea about any of it. Incredulity aside, that’s one down; here’s hoping it’s the first pebble in an avalanche.
