Answer from:
A very common question. Actually lots of ladies worry about it: I have been taking the contraceptive pill for 10 years, for 5 years, do I need to panic, do I need to stop it, will that affect my fertility? The answer is no. The birth control pill does not affect fertility. Why am I saying that? If we think it affects fertility, actually, if a lady takes the contraceptive pill that means she’s not ovulating, that means she’s keeping those eggs for her to use in the future so, it can be a counter argument that actually birth control pill can help fertility in the future because I’m not ovulating while in fact it doesn’t contribute positively, doesn’t contribute negatively because every lady is born with specific hundreds of thousands of eggs that are not going to increase. After puberty, a pool of eggs are recruited, one of them will end up being ovulated, the rest will undergo a process called apoptosis or programmed cell death. So, whether we are preventing those eggs from ovulating or whether we are ovulating by ovarian stimulation or whether we are taking the contraceptive pill or whether or not, some of those eggs will be undergoing the programmed cell death which is apoptosis. So taking the combined pill will not affect fertility but one key advice is that, we always advise ladies that whenever they are ready to start a family, try to stop the contraceptive pill as soon as before you start trying and start trying afterwards.
Answer from:
I really do not promote use of oral contraceptive pills for too long because it can affect the fertility in a way that, for example, I actually was working as an extra thing in one of the egg banks when I recruiting the egg donors for a brief time, every week I used to spend there and I noticed that those young girls who are just egg donors who haven’t come to us as fertility patients or anything, who are actually here to donate eggs for the subfertile women, they have smaller ovaries and when very quiet ovaries. I would say just because they’ve been on pills for 8 years and 10 years. So, yes, very prolonged use of pills can probably affect fertility in the short term – meaning, the withdrawal of the pills will let the ovaries bounce back. So, we used to basically stop the ovarian OC pills for three months for those egg donors and that was in the protocol if they were using it for more than five years, we wouldn’t take the egg straight away because it’s the same dose. So, what happens actually is the OC pill does two things: if a patient has been on OC pills for too long, the actual outcome that we have seen when we stimulate these ovaries in the IVF, two things happen: they take longer to respond to the same level: meaning, for example, another woman would take 10 to 12 days of injections, these women might need 15 doses, 15 to 16 days of injections so, the ovaries are very quiet, they are not responding very nicely and the second thing is the total dose of injections required for such women was higher. So, if another woman would respond adequately to say 225 units of gonadotropins, this woman might need 300 or more. So a long time use of OC pills would do these two things in the larger perspective.
Answer from:
The contraceptive pill does not cause infertility and it does not affect a future pregnancy.
When we stop taking a contraceptive pill, we can be pregnant the day after. It doesn’t delay infertility and of course it has nothing to do with damaging fertility. The fact that a woman doesn’t see a cycle or has a when a woman takes the pill every day or has a regular cycle – doesn’t mean that her ovaries are being damaged or have been affected.
We must know that every patient every ovary has its biological clock, it works like that from zero to menopause and let’s say that nature knows when ovaries will stop working – has nothing to do with the pill. Pills have another function, ovaries have another function.
