Here’s a very unsettling and bizarre criminal case you almost certainly haven’t heard of — even though it should’ve been national news at the time.

In 2021, an 18-year-old named Cora Vides was a senior at Laguna Blanca School in Santa Barbara. On Valentine’s Day, Cora invited a longtime friend over to her family’s house. Everything was normal, right up until Cora declared out of nowhere that she was bisexual. Then Cora told her friend to close her eyes, supposedly so that she could demonstrate a new technique for meditation. But it was all a ruse. After counting to three, Cora suddenly began stabbing her friend in the neck. The victim managed to escape, although she nearly bled to death in the hospital. Her lung had collapsed. She needed surgery to reconstruct her larynx. At no point did she have any idea why her friend had just tried to kill her. All she knew was that Cora had snapped, entered some kind of dissociative state, and violently ambushed her.

At trial, Cora was found guilty of attempted first-degree murder. But the jury also found that Cora was insane at the time of the attack, meaning she might not face any prison time at all. She’ll spend a few months in a psychiatric hospital instead, because that’s how the legal system works in California. In reaching that decision, the jury considered Cora’s claim that she was “non-binary,” as well as the fact that she had been diagnosed with various mental health conditions.

But maybe the most important piece of evidence concerned a hormonal birth control pill that Cora had been taking.

The Santa Barbara Independent states:

Defense Attorney Robert Sanger said a new birth control medication Cora Vides was taking was also known to cause ‘significant side effects,’ including depression. Cora Vides’s older sister, Maya, testified that a month before the stabbing, Cora told her she was cutting herself. Maya responded that she’d also struggled with self-harm and suggested Cora try the same oral contraception she’d been prescribed, which helped balance her hormones. Cora did so, but complained to friends the pills made her feel even more ‘off.’

It wasn’t just the defense attorneys who made this claim. Doctor Brandon Yakush, a court-appointed forensic psychologist, asserted that the new birth control medication was, “a major factor in how her depression got worse during that time.”

In other words, because this person took hormonal birth control, she degraded her already-fragile mental state even further. But the doctor added that, as far as he knew, there wasn’t much literature on birth control’s ability to affect the mind on a deeper level, beyond causing depression.

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This is one of the reasons you rarely, if ever, hear about cases like Cora’s. Yes, media outlets don’t like running stories that are critical of the pharmaceutical industry, because Big Pharma buys more advertisements than anyone. And we all know, as we discussed last week, that the “non-binary/transgender” angle of this story also guaranteed that no one would talk about it.

But it’s also true, when you look at scientific research, that there isn’t a lot of data about hormonal birth control medications. They’ve been mass-prescribed without much investigation into possible side effects. We see that a lot in the pharmaceutical industry, if you haven’t noticed. It was the same story with ADHD drugs, SSRIs, Alzheimer’s medications, the COVID shot, Ozempic, over-the-counter decongestants, and so on. In every one of these cases, “miraculous drugs” have been marketed and widely distributed. And then, many years or even decades later, we finally get to see some hard evidence. And that hard evidence, at a minimum, dramatically changes the narrative that Big Pharma has constructed around a particular drug.

That moment is now arriving for hormonal birth control. For generations now, women who take these medications have reported psychiatric side effects. But the specific nature of those side effects, beyond mood swings and depression, hasn’t been spelled out in medical literature.

That’s why a new study from researchers at Rice University in Texas, published in the journal “Hormones and Behavior,” has been getting so much attention. In short, the researchers found that hormonal contraceptives affect “emotional processing and memory.” And these effects haven’t been disclosed to any of the tens of millions of women who are currently taking these contraceptives. Nor has anyone considered the broader implications of these side effects, which are significant.

To run this experiment, the researchers at Rice showed “positive, negative and neutral images” to two groups — the control group that wasn’t taking hormonal birth control, and another group that was. Then, in addition to administering a memory test, the researchers instructed their test subjects to apply a variety of “emotion regulation strategies,” including “distancing, reinterpretation and immersion.”

In case you’re not up on the lingo, “psychological distancing” involves, “taking an objective, third-person perspective to an emotional event, while reinterpretation involves reframing or imagining a better outcome in the context of the emotional event.” Meanwhile, “immersion” means “deeply engaging with the aspects of an emotional event to increase affect, either positive or negative.” So this is all meaningless psychobabble, but the basic idea is that they told the test subjects to work on their feelings.

The end result, according to Rice, is that:

Women on hormonal contraceptives showed stronger emotional reactions compared to naturally cycling women. When they used strategies like distancing or reinterpretation, they remembered fewer details of negative events, though their general memory remained intact. In other words, they could recall the overall event but not all of the specifics.

That last part is especially interesting. Whatever you make of the stuff about “immersion” and “psychological distancing,” the impact of hormonal contraceptives on memory has implications that no one ever talks about. What happens when millions of women become more forgetful and more emotional at the same time? Do these women vote differently? Are their relationships more unstable as a result? Over at Rice University, they’re not concerned with any of these possibilities. Instead, their researchers described the potential for large-scale memory loss as “exciting,” saying it might help women forget about traumatic, unhappy experiences.

This is “logic” that wouldn’t fly in any other environment. Imagine if you’re an engineer who makes passenger airplanes, and you suddenly discover that one of your “safety features” actually has a totally unexpected side effect. It could be good or bad — you’re not completely sure. Most likely, in that case, your first response would be to shut everything down, until you figure out exactly what the risks are — and what other risks there might be, that you don’t know about. That should be your response, anyway. If Boeing had done that, then there’s a good chance that their “Max” jets wouldn’t have crashed on two separate occasions.

But in medicine, the discovery of unintended side effects that directly impact the human brain, we’re told, is really “exciting.” This is complete nonsense. It’s spin masquerading as science. In reality, what these researchers have discovered is additional evidence that hormonal birth control has effects on the brain that no one — including the self-described experts — actually understands. And this evidence is continuing to pile up, year after year.

In 2023, for example, researchers in Montreal, writing for the journal “Frontiers in Endocrinology,” discovered evidence that hormonal contraceptives shrink a portion of the prefrontal cortex — specifically, the portion of the prefrontal cortex that’s involved in controlling emotions, maintaining self-control, making decisions and handling fear. This part of the brain is called the “ventro-medial prefrontal cortex.”

“We recruited healthy adults aged 23-35 who identified as women currently using, or having used, oral contraceptives, [as well as] women who never used any hormonal contraceptives. … Compared to men, only current users [of hormonal contraceptives] showed a thinner ventro-medial prefrontal cortex.”

Once again, “Only current users showed a thinner ventro-medial prefrontal cortex.”

Admittedly, I don’t understand what half of those words mean. But the takeaway is pretty clear. These drugs — at least while women are taking them — have an observable effect on a critical area of the brain. And that’s not a small thing. Even the best neurologist in the world doesn’t have a complete understanding of how the brain works. That’s what makes neurology a cutting-edge, competitive field of medicine. And it’s also what makes hormonal birth control a far more uncertain (and even dangerous) proposition than most women realize.

Again, you don’t need to take my word for any of this. Writing in the European Journal of Neuroscience a year later, the same researchers from Montreal observed that oral contraceptives are, “generally used for years and often initiated during adolescence, a sensitive period where certain brain regions involved in the fear circuitry are still undergoing important reorganization.” They stated that it’s “unknown” whether these contraceptives cause “long-lasting changes in the fear circuitry.” So they ran the following experiment:

We collected structural MRI data in 98 healthy adult women and extracted grey matter volumes and cortical thickness of key regions of the fear circuitry. … Among women who initiated oral contraceptives earlier in adolescence, a short duration of use was associated with smaller hippocampal grey matter volumes and thicker ventro-medial prefrontal cortex compared to a longer duration of use. … For both gray matter volumes and cortical thickness of the right ventro-medial prefrontal cortex, women with an early oral-contraceptive onset had more grey matter at a short duration of use than those with a later onset. … Our results suggest that oral contraceptive use earlier in adolescence may induce lasting effects on [structures related to] fear learning and its regulation. These findings support further investigation into the timing of oral contraceptive use to better comprehend how it could disrupt normal brain development processes.

Well, that’s an understatement. The fact that these contraceptives can impact the size of the prefrontal cortex, according to these researchers, “supports further investigation.” You think? It would’ve been nice if this investigation had commenced before tens of millions of women were given these drugs, which function by tricking their bodies into acting like they’re pregnant. This is the conversation that we should’ve had, at any point, in the past half-century. But I guess we’re supposed to conclude that it’s better late than never.

Again, the impact on society at large is completely ignored. What happens when we break the “fear response” in the brains of millions of women? If we did something like that, could it explain, perhaps, why so many American women are petrified of climate change, the plight of criminal illegal aliens, the prospect of losing the right to kill their children, and the fate of a tiny country in Eastern Europe that they can’t even locate on a map? Could it explain why, if only women could vote, then Kamala Harris would’ve won all 50 states? Could there be a connection there?

And while we’re at it — what about the study (published in the journal of Computational Biology) showing that doses of hormonal birth control could be reduced by more than 90%, while remaining effective? And what about the study from Denmark showing that “birth-control pills affect the body’s ability to regulate stress”?

Here’s a statement from one of those researchers, a man named Michael Winterdahl:

It reads: “Our results are really important because they indicate that people who use birth-control pills do not experience the same reduced stress hormone levels in connection with social activity as people who do not use the pill.”

And then there’s the possibility that birth control affects the kinds of men that women want to be around. After all, in normal circumstances, male testosterone is greatly reduced when they’re around pregnant women. And if these drugs are making most women seem “pregnant,” then it stands to reason that men around them will have lower testosterone. That explains the dating scene in most of California, Oregon, New York, Virginia and so on.

We could talk for the next month about studies like this, most of which are never discussed on the national news. No matter where you stand on the issue in general, you have to admit that there are a lot of unknowns, and a lot of red flags, that are mostly being ignored. No one in any position of authority is interested in addressing any of these questions, or the issue of fraudulent medicine more generally. That said, there are some signs that there could be changes in the near future, if you’re the optimistic type.

The other day, as you might have seen, Donald Trump suggested he’s going to push for more accountability in this particular domain.

Screenshot: TruthSocial

Here’s part of what he wrote:

“It is very important that the Drug Companies justify the success of their various Covid Drugs. Many people think they are a miracle that saved Millions of lives. Others disagree! With CDC being ripped apart over this question, I want the answer, and I want it NOW. I have been shown information from Pfizer, and others, that is extraordinary, but they never seem to show those results to the public. Why not???”

This is obviously not a post about birth control. But it gets at the same underlying issue, which needs to be resolved as quickly as possible. The largest pharmaceutical companies in the country have been hiding data — or outright lying about it — for a long time now. Just in case you’ve forgotten just how overt and shameless this propaganda was during COVID, here’s a couple of clips from just a few years ago, in which Pfizer reports that its vaccine is 100% effective for children. And then CNN and MSNBC dutifully repeat the talking point. Watch:

We all know how this turned out. Eventually, we learned the truth about the COVID shot. And by that point, for millions of Americans, it was already too late.

In the same way, today, we’re now finding out — very slowly, piece by piece — the truth about the various effects of hormonal contraceptives on the brain.

This is not how science is supposed to work. It’s not how public health is supposed to work. But it’s the way things operate at the moment. And before you (or someone you know) takes one of these pills, or any other pill that’s handed to you by a doctor with the promise of correcting some alleged deficiency in the human condition, you have to recognize this simple fact: None of the people involved in the production or distribution of that drug really have any idea what it will do to you. If they claim they know, they’re lying. But like the friend of “Cora Vides” in Santa Barbara, you might nevertheless find out one day — in a very painful and tragic manner — exactly what those consequences will be.