TikTok has gained notoriety as a birthplace of gross, extremely ill-advised tutorials on everything from how to file your teeth into creepy Gremlin fangs to injecting your lips with filler. In one of the latest cringe-y how-to’s to drop on the platform, TikTokers are teaching people how to pull out their own IUDs. But while it might be easy to brush this off as yet another Gen Z trend, the motivation behind it — steep barriers that include doctors refusing to remove the devices — raise serious questions about patient autonomy, especially when those patients happen to have uteruses.
These issues entered the national conversation earlier this summer, when Britney Spears revealed in a testimony about her conservatorship that she wasn’t allowed to remove her IUD, Insider pointed out. "It took a horror story like Britney's to show that these methods that we love can be used in a very bad way," Diana Greene Foster, a demographer and research director at the University of California San Francisco, told the outlet.
