A new study published on the medical journal BMJ showed that taking contraceptive pills before or during pregnancy do not contribute to the risk of delivering a baby with birth defects, reported The Guardian on Thursday.
The researchers studied the records of almost 900,000 live births in Denmark from 1997 until 2011 and found that even those mothers who used contraceptive pills after their pregnancy were less likely to have children with birth defects than those who had never popped a pill.
"We confirmed that there wasn't any association between oral contraceptives and major birth defects," said Brittany Charlton, the study's author and a scientist at Harvard University's TH Chan School of Public Health.
"Our findings were especially reassuring given that we were able to use a different approach," Charlton added. "We were able to leverage prescription registries and thus eliminate any bias from women inaccurately recalling their use [of the pill]."
Time reported on Wednesday that the researchers also analyzed the women's use of oral contraceptives before and early in their pregnancy, and found that eight percent of these women stopped using the pill less than three months before being pregnant, while one percent - a significant 10,000 women - still continued with the pill even during pregnancy.
A fifth of these women, or around 176,000 of the subjects, were found to have never used a contraceptive pill.
"Many women stop using oral contraceptives when planning a pregnancy and conceive within just a few months," noted Charlton. "In both of those examples, a woman may inadvertently expose her offspring during pregnancy to exogenous sex hormones."
Even the rate of birth defects was exactly the same among women who had never used contraceptive pills and those who had used it before and during their early pregnancy, which was at about 25 birth defects for every 1,000 live births, noted NPR on Wednesday.
