Can You Take Birth Control At Night

i) Birth control pills prevent pregnancy through two dissimilar mechanisms

All nascence command pills utilize hormones to prevent pregnancy. Some contain a hormone called progestin. Others contain two hormones, progestin and estrogen. All of them work by doing 2 things: They prevent women from ovulating, and they cause the cervical mucus to thicken, which makes information technology more than difficult for a sperm to penetrate and brand contact with an egg if the woman is ovulating.

In a manner, birth control mimics the torso's response to pregnancy."There is some truth to the thought that birth command pills trick your body into thinking you're pregnant," said Dr. Vanessa Cullins, Planned Parenthood'due south vice president of external medical affairs. "When y'all're meaning, you don't ovulate, and the cervical fungus is thickening to prevent anything from easily getting into your uterus."

2) Lots of women have nascence control incorrectly

If women follow the exact instructions for taking birth control pills — every day, at the same fourth dimension — they prevent pregnancy in 99 pct of all cases. But lots of people don't exercise that. In real life, birth control pills have a 9 percent failure rate. That means nine of every 100 women using birth control pills as their just ways of contraception become pregnant in whatsoever given year.

"It's hard to actually [take the pill at the same time every day] when y'all're living a decorated life," Cullins says. "If you take these pills every unmarried day, the chances of getting pregnant is 1 percentage. But typically the chance is much college than that, because people miss pills. This isn't but true with birth control pills. It's true with any prescription medication."

Nativity command pills have a college failure rate than other contraceptives, like intra-uterine devices (IUDs) or nativity control rings.

The primary divergence: Pills have to exist taken every day, which leaves more room for human error.

3) There's a 3-hour window for taking your birth control pill "on time"

I asked Cullins whether at that place is wiggle room in terms of when birth control is constructive. For example, if a birth control user typically takes a pill at 9 am but ane forenoon waits until 11 am, is she at greater risk for pregnancy?

The answer is no. Cullins said that for those taking progestin-only pills, "on time" means taking the pill within the same three-hour window daily. A three-hour difference is not enough to lower the pill's efficacy. "That's acceptable," she said.

For combination progestin-estrogen pills, the space is even wider. Women who miss one twenty-four hour period of their pill can take 2 pills the next day without reducing their nascency control's effectiveness. This chart with data from Planned Parenthood shows the organization'due south recommendations for how to handle a missed combination pill.

"Ii or three missed pills is when you demand to begin to become concerned, and one time you get to three missed pills, you need to consider emergency contraception and using backup birth control until she has finished the showtime week of the pills of the new package that is begun subsequently her bleed from emergency contraception," Cullins said.

four) Missing a menstruation on the pill doesn't mean something'due south wrong

Missing a period while on the pill doesn't bespeak annihilation aberrant, Cullins said, as long as you take been taking the pill consistently and correctly each 24-hour interval.

"It's non dangerous non to have your period while on the pill," she says. "What happens is, over time, the uterine lining can become very thin if yous take the pill regularly. All that means is if yous stop bleeding on the pill, the lining has go so thin that you lot don't have annihilation to drain from."

This is not permanent: When a woman stops taking birth command pills, the ovaries start making more estrogen, the uterine lining gets thicker, and women start to bleed again.

Missed periods after taking your pills incorrectly, however, could point a pregnancy. In that situation, it's worth taking a pregnancy exam.

5) We don't know whether most antibiotics make birth control less effective

There are two antibiotics that researchers have plant make nativity command pills less effective: griseofulvin, an antifungal used to treat athlete's foot and ringworm, and rifampicin, which is typically used to treat tuberculosis.

The reason that happens is that these drugs speed up the liver's metabolism, which makes the liver metabolize the hormones in the birth command faster. Every bit a result, hormones leave the blood stream faster and are unable to adequately affect the ovaries to forestall ovulation or the neck to prevent thickening of the cervical fungus.

Lots of antibiotics, not but the two listed above, come up with warnings that they'll make birth control ineffective and suggest using a backup method of contraception. While a backup method is never a bad idea, there'southward really sparse evidence that these other drugs make birth command less effective. "Doubtfulness persists with respect to the other broad-spectrum antibiotics," researchers in the periodical Contraception wrote in a review article about interactions between birth control and antibiotics. They argue that in calorie-free of that uncertainty, it is completely appropriate for women to use a backup method — only not to ditch their antibiotics out of concern over interactions.

6) Those "sugar pills" at the end of a birth control pack? They take active ingredients.

Lots of nativity control packs have four weeks of pills: three weeks of pills that prevent pregnancy and one week of pills that are inactive.

Women tin safely skip that last week of pills and notwithstanding prevent pregnancy, Cullins said. But that doesn't mean the last calendar week's pills are just sugar pills. As it turns out, some of them actually have active ingredients to make the pills work better or aid in women'south health.

"Some of the pills might have depression-dose estrogen for three to four days, to help forestall breakthrough haemorrhage [bleeding in the heart of a cycle]," she said. "Others sometimes contain atomic number 26 or folic acid or other vitamins. And the hard part almost skipping the pills is that you have to think exactly when to start back up."

7) Even under Obamacare, not anybody with insurance gets free birth control

The number of women getting costless nascence command pills has quadrupled under Obamacare, recent research shows. 2-thirds of women in a contempo Guttmacher Found survey reported paying null dollars for their contraceptive.

But that however leaves one-3rd of women paying something for nascency control, even after Obamacare has mandated information technology be free.

The one-third of women still paying for their birth control are nigh probable in grandfathered health insurance plans. These are the plans that existed before Obamacare that do not have to comply with the contraceptives mandate (or most other Obamacare requirements, for that affair).

Grandfathered plans are, however, disappearing. When a company significantly changes its insurance (drops a benefit, for example, or changes what enrollees have to pay), and so it loses its grandfathered status. Just over a quarter of wellness insurance plans are currently grandfathered, a number that has steadily dropped since Obamacare passed.

Every bit that figure declines, the number of women accessing no-cost contraceptives will likely keep growing.