The Highwire with Del Bigtree - BIRTH CONTROL BACKLASH

Episode Date: November 4, 2025

Pfizer faces over a thousand lawsuits from women after its popular birth control drug, Depo-Provera, was linked to brain tumors. As the UN releases a report on the global fertility crisis, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker is moving to allow pharmacists to dispense birth control without a doctor’s prescription.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

Let's talk about another product of Pfizer. We have the COVID vaccine, but we also have a lot of products. Pfizer, one of the most sued companies in the history of pharmaceutical companies, paying some of the biggest fines imaginable. Well, they have another legal fight on their hands. This is New York Post, popular birth control linked to brain tumors and new study as over 1,000 women sue Pfizer over health risk. That's 1,200 when you get into the article now. And I want to tip the hat to NBC News when they do. do great jobs, we will highlight them. And they jumped on this story and it looked like this.

Robin Phillip has been through two surgeries and months of radiation, all due to a tumor she now believes was caused by her birth control injections. If I were new from the gigo, I wouldn't never took that shot. In 2018, doctors discovered a tumor called a meningioma pressing on Phillips brain. This right here. Emergency surgery left her without vision in her left eye. She even had to relearn how to walk. One in four women in the United States use it, with black women taking the shot at nearly double the national rate. Philip took it for nearly 30 years. The only time you stopped was when you had your two children. Yes. Multiple studies have found a potential link between Depo and meningioma, including one that found

women who took the drug for more than a year, had five times the risk of developing the tumor. So overall, menigiaoma is not common. The likelihood of having had. having a meningioma as a depot user is incredibly low. So what we're looking at here, this is a major deal because, as you saw, one in four women have taken this or are taking this, and you look over to the legal review. So the legal publications are jumping all over this because this has the potential to be a gigantic lawsuit for Pfizer. One of the publication says this, Pfizer faces growing legal storm over Deppo Pereira. And you look into this and it says legal experts say,

Deppar Povero, this is a multi-district lawsuit, could become one of the most consequential pharmaceutical mass torts since the Johnson & Johnson-Talc litigation. If Pfizer's preemption defense fails, the company may face mounting settlement pressure. Johnson & Johnson has been on the hook for billions and billions of dollars because of their cancer-causing with that product, with the baby powder. So this outcome will hinge on whether Pfizer has the ability and the duty to warn. Did they do that? Did they do it in time? And so really, I mean, when you look at this, when you step back and look at this, this Pfizer product, Pfizer was so excited to prevent women from having babies that it kept important information from them,

like it was causing brain tumors. That's how excited they were for this product to work. But we look into the studies here, and NBC News covered a little bit of it, but there was a JAMA study that was just published this year, 2025, actually last month. And it looked at this Deppra Pavera, and it's actually the scientific name or the medical name is depo-madroxy progesterone acetate. Big mouthful there, but it's looking at the risk, and it looked over at researchers here examined over 61 million female patient records. Huge study, gigantic study, and it looked at whether this would cause this in these patients' records, and it found this. Basically, they found a 2.43 times increased risk for the use of

Deppo-Pri-Pravera, or just this drug, depotidroxy progesterone, compared to the controls. And that's an increase in meningoma diagnosis. So these are these brain tumors, not a good thing. But it talks about this. And in the conclusion of this study, it says in the study, women receiving depomodroxy progesterone acetate had a greater relative risk of subsequent menageoma diagnosis, especially with prolonged exposures and starting the medication at older ages. So those are two really important points for our viewers out there.

prolonged exposures, and this is an injectable hormone contraceptive. Every three months, the injection is re-upped by your doctor. So people, women using this for longer periods of time, you know, it's showing that it may not be the best thing. This builds on a BMJ study in 2024, which really raised the alarms. This looked at over 100,000 women to assess the risk. And it looked at a couple of these hormone birth controls. And it says this.

Analysis showed excessive risk of men in genoma with use of of medrogestrone, that's an oral pill, odds ratio 3.49, so 3.49 times the risk. And then you have the medroxy progesterone acetate, there's that 5.55 times the risk to placebo and then pro-megastrone. That's 2.39. And it says this excess risk was driven by prolonged use, just over or equal to one year. So this even shorter in this study. And so you have the studies, you have the lawsuits, And it's up to leaders, it's up to governors, legislators to really act on this. And that's not what's happening. Why?

We look over again to Illinois, Governor J.B. Pritzer. He basically has just signed a law allowing over-the-counter hormonal birth control for universities. It says, Governor J.B. Pritzker signed legislation Thursday morning at the UIC College of Pharmacy, allowing pharmacists to give out hormonal birth control to a patient who who has not seen a doctor. So again, you have, I mean, are they giving out this birth control? Highly questionable if that's happening,

and if it is, it's very difficult. It really needs to be looked at by the state there. But again, you have this surpassing of doctors. We want them out of the picture. We want to give pharmacists the job to basically just come in, get your shot, get your birth control, get your vaccine, and be on your way. No conversations, just be done with it.

But this brings up a greater conversation here. of reproductive rights, of fertility, of population control. And something just happened out of the United Nations. And we know from our previous reporting, the United Nations has been highly suspect. They've run some of the sterilization campaigns over the decades in lower developed countries. A new report just came out by the United Nations Population Fund,

which we had our eyes on here. And this is called the State of the World 2025 report. And they call it the real fertility crisis. And it's very interesting here. they don't even mask their words. They say in this report, many leaders and advisors, especially those in developed countries, predicted a race to oblivion unless measures were implemented to control women's fertility. This is Erlich and Erlich, that's Paul Erlich, and that's the overpopulation bomb. The population bomb is this book. And it says here in the UN, too often through practices

such as coerce use of contraception and forced sterilization or abortion, which the UN ran in a lot of cases. So they're saying that was wrong. And they're pivoting here, which, you know, hats off to them. But the pivot is kind of a symbolic win for this conversation. And they say this. And this is should also parallel. It echoes what we're seeing with the vaccine paradigm. And informed consent is coming to the forefront.

Also happening in the fertility crisis. So the UN Population Fund report says this. Reproductive agency, that's what they're calling it. The capacity to exercise informed in. power decision-making over one's reproduction. This capacity requires more than an ability to say yes or no. It requires an enabling environment in which individuals and couples can make choices unfettered by legal, political, economic, and normative constraints.

It is a fundamental aspect of bodily autonomy, self-determination, and human rights. They're calling for international frameworks, recognized reproductive agency, essential for gender quality and empowerment of women and girls. But this also is a greater kind of bellwether for the entire medical industry when it comes anything from fertility drugs to contraception to the vaccine industry. And so why is this a big deal? Well, maybe the UN has been reading these headlines. This is just from last year. U.S. birth rate hits all time low. CDC data shows at CBS News. And you can see these headlines all over the world. Japan, you're seeing them over in the UK are seeing them as well. There is a big fertility

problem. And the UN looks like it's pivoting majorly. And I want to end on this. Fertility may not be about how many interventions the medical community can give, maybe rather what we avoid or cultivate within ourselves. That is the actual story. Two new studies just came out. One of them shows organophosphate pesticide exposure and semen quality in healthy young men. It's a pilot study. And it says a major strength of this study is that it is the first to analyze associations between organophosphate pesticide exposure and semen quality and healthy young men from the general population and not infertile men or farm workers as well add that. And it says this, this is what they found. Specifically, we found that organophosphate pesticide exposure to be inversely associated

with sperm motility, which many consider to be the parameter most predictive of successful fertilization. This is your glyphosate. This is your chlorophytes. A lot of things we covered on this show, Zenn Honeycutt talked about it as well. This is a major study and it's showing in the general population. You really want to avoid this stuff if you're trying to get pregnant, have a baby. But also, we have another piece of research that's coming in. The microbiome, this is still, sadly, when it comes to the mainstream, it's not well understood, but it is becoming well understood. This is another study just out last month, hot off the presses, from gut to gamut,

how the microbiome influences fertility and preconception health. And they're calling to set standards and integrate this microbiome science into reproductive medicine. to basically reconceptualize fertility. So these are big moves because it's not about, again, how much pharma can give you, but it's maybe about how much can we detract from this? How much can we look at our own bodies and the actual living system as a whole of our own body

when it comes to fertility? Because there's some major problems that need to be solved. The fertility crisis is not going away anytime soon. Well, and it looks like the fertility crisis is on purpose, which is something that we've got to ask ourselves again as we led this show out on science's power, that power is derived not by truth, but by a story. The story that we're overpopulated is one that we've carried for, I think, far too long. And it's allowing us to make really bad decisions.

When you look at Pritzker, I mean, I guess if you believe you've got a control population, then both stopping fertility, stopping birth, works with a product. And if that product happens to give you brain cancer and kills you off, that's a two-for-one, two-for-right there. We just reduced the population by several. You know, I don't know if that's his thinking, but it certainly appears to be the outcome as we see more and more, these companies that were trusted for far too long.

Pfizer. I mean, it's amazing that anyone buys any product from this company any longer, that they're allowed to have a business inside of this country when they murder as many people as they do knowingly, you know, when they hide all of the science that they have internally. It's just, but we keep telling the story and more and more people are listening. And I want to say, Jeffrey, as I sit here, thinking, you know, so many young mothers are now watching this show and thinking about like,

what do I need to do? How do I prepare for my birth? What do I do once I get there? There's so many ways to detoxify and things, but immediately, you know, looking at what products are using right now that maybe you shouldn't if, you know, giving birth is in your future.