Potential complications from use. Have heard some horror stories with regards to IUD failure (and resulting pregnancy) and uterus perforation, so it is not such a small risk as to by hypothetical.
It's my understanding that with birth control pills, a woman can indefinitely delay her menstrual cycle. I can absolutely see some making a choice to not have periods at all, if the other side effects for them are negligible. An option that not only brings periods back but makes them messier would not look very attractive in comparison.
As with most things health and lifestyle, everything involves tradeoffs, and choices are dependent on individual valuation of those tradeoffs.
Have you ever experienced recurring or ongoing debilitating pain? Going from 1-2 days of pain per month to more doesn't sound like "no side effects".
Aren't they meant to be extremely painful to insert/remove?
IUDs can cause side-effects especially the first few cycles after insertion.
The best birth control method (as defined by least side effects and max efficacy) I’ve come across is cycle tracking / family planning (called that because you can use it to get pregnant as well as prevent pregnancy). It’s simple (you can only get pregnant at certain times in your cycle), but there’s nothing for pharma to sell (it’s free!). Weirdly, doctors never seem to trust women to go through with it (and always try to push medicated birth control), but it’s easy, even before Apple added it to their products.
There are multiple methods (temp tracking, calendar tracking, vaginal mucus tracking, etc) that fall under the general header of natural family planning. High efficacy numbers only come with extremely consistent use of multiple methods. With all that work, it ties with the effectiveness of birth control pills. With only a portion of that work, it's not very effective at all in comparison.
From https://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/birth-control/fertil... -
> FAMs are about 77%–98% effective. That means 2–23 out of 100 couples who use FAMs will get pregnant each year, depending on which method(s) are used. If you use multiple FAMs together, they work even better.
> The better you are about using FAMs the right way — tracking your fertility signs daily and avoiding sex or using birth control on “unsafe” days — the more effective they’ll be. But there’s a chance that you’ll still get pregnant, even if you always use them perfectly.