Should you 'take a break' from the pill?

ANSWER:

No. While the idea sounds refreshing, a break from the pill won’t do much – other than make you more prone to pregnancy.

“A woman can take the pill from puberty to menopause without any harmful side effects,” says Jennifer Frost, senior researcher at the Guttmacher Institute, a sexual and reproductive health research centre in the US.

Interesting facts about the pill:

FACT 1: 39 % of women use the contraceptive pill in Australia*. It’s the most widely used birth control, followed by condoms (28 per cent) and the combined use of the pill and condoms (28 per cent)

FACT 2: The first oral contraceptive pill was introduced 52 years ago. Since then, more than 200 million women worldwide have used the pill. Source: Journal of the History of Medicine

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• Source: A 2008 study by Macquarie University, Sydney