By

Jennifer Gerson , Mariel Padilla

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Cara Stanton didn’t get her period until she was 22. For years, doctors — including her pediatrician — recommended taking hormonal birth control to kickstart it. But Stanton was hesitant.

“If something doesn’t make sense to me, I question it,” said Stanton, now a 32-year-old nurse practitioner based in Michigan. “It was just one of those things where I thought, ‘I don’t know that my ovaries are broken, so quit trying to put a bandaid on them.’

When she was 10, Stanton was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa. She grew accustomed to frequent medical treatment and was chronically underweight. She also said she wasn’t too worried about a late period because her mother, aunts and grandmothers all got th

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