They seem to be unrelated at all.
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Some forms of birth control are what’s called a “prodrug”. That means the chemicals in the pill you take are not the *actual* medicine. Rather, your body absorbs those chemicals, takes them to the liver, and they’re altered to then become the actual medicine. This is usually because the *active* medicine is likely to be poorly absorbed by the intestines and may be prone to being broken down by the acid in the stomach, but by making a few small tweaks we can get the medicine to sneak around those defenses.
Your liver has a bunch of machines in it that help convert things into other things (like prodrug -> drug and, importantly, estrogen -> broken down estrogen metabolite). That’s how we detoxify things. Some medicines have the potential to gum up the works and slow these machines down, others have the potential to ramp them up and make them work faster. Some antibiotics fall into that second category.
The result is a liver which is revved up and breaks down estrogen much faster, and because the birth control is all about controlling hormone levels, the birth control becomes less effective. This doesn’t apply to all antibiotics, just some of them.
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