It's an article you wouldn't expect in a pop culture/style magazine like Salon but, given the widespread misery that the so-called birth-control pill has brought to countless women, such stories as Glamour editor Geraldine Sealey's "Why I Hate the Pill" is certainly relevant to Salon's readership.The "pill" is 50 years old this month and there's a score of MSM articles praising it for liberating women, putting them in the workforce, revolutionizing culture, decreasing population growth, even improving motherhood.
For instance, in a Forbes article, Hannah Seligson quotes Jane Wurland as saying the pill gave her the opportunity to start her own company and Elaine Tyler May describing it as making it possible "for women to walk through doors that had once been closed to them." Gloria Feldt, former CEO of Planned Parenthood, goes further -- "the pill literally saved my life...It enabled me to purposefully have a life that I designed."
But amid the birthday celebrations are some voices of concern -- many more than have been raised in the past. Some are of the expected type such as Katie Couric's frustration that the government isn't paying for even more oral contraceptives. In her CBS notebook, she joins with Planned Parenthood's call for taxpayers to pick up the tab for the pills of 17.4 million low-income women.
But it's the other concerns that create a damper for the pill's birthday party. Those concerns include the Raquel Welch piece from CNN that I referred to earlier this week in which the famous sex symbol decries the damage the pill has caused women, society and morality.
And those concerns include the debilitating effect the pill creates on many women's sex drives which is the focus of Sealey's Salon article. Sealey writes,
"I felt flat, with no detectable mid-cycle hormonal surge. Eventually, my libido dissipated so that just the thought of sex repulsed me, which left me confused, depressed and cut off from myself and my partner...On the pill, I felt as turned off as a burned-out bulb, and off the pill, I did not.
Doctors who treat sexual disorders have long recognized the pill's potential for dampening sex drive in some women. And researchers have a good grasp on why it happens: Oral contraceptives lower levels of available testosterone, a key to libido. 'If you play around with sex steroid hormones, you play around with sexual function,' says Irwin Goldstein, M.D., director of San Diego Sexual Medicine at Alvarado Hospital, who has been involved with sexual dysfunction research for decades."
(This CBS News story has much more about the negative impact on sex drive.)
But that's not all. Sealey speaks of how many of her friends have suffered other excruciating side-effects from the pill. "In my own life, female friends and acquaintances have abandoned hormonal birth control for a variety of reasons. It made them nauseous, moody or depressed, caused unacceptable weight gain, paralyzing migraines or breakthrough bleeding, put them at risk of blood clots, or drove their blood pressure to dangerous heights.
Or they were just damned sick of taking pills every day. 'I was a crazy woman on birth control,' says Dr. Basinski, who's had her own personal battles with the pill over the years. 'Out of control emotional. I used it on and off for 13 years and really struggled with it.' In her practice, Basinski sees patient after patient who want off their pills. 'Many women just don't feel good on them,' she says."
And what about the scientific studies which establish a link between oral contraceptives and breast cancer? For a long time these studies have been ignored (even suppressed) by those who believe the benefits the pill brings to the sexual revolution outweigh anything else. But the facts are just too strong. Therefore even such common sources as WebMD and the American Cancer Society are now acknowledging the connection.
Is that enough to make one reconsider whether the birth control pill really deserves a birthday party?
If not, consider a few of those other concerns that are surfacing with greater regularity and force. Issues like the environmental damage being wrought by the pill's estrogen component being flushed out into the water supply. Read "Bringing Cancer to the Dinner Table" at Scientific American for something to think about.
Or contemplate how the pill has escalated the world's looming demographic disaster. Miranda Devine examines this impact in her column "Copulate to Populate" published in the Sydney Morning Herald.
As the tattered sexual revolution spawned by the pill hits middle age we can see the consequences of unmooring sex from the possibility of children, and the rejection of the age-old imperative to be "fruitful and multiply".
The result is a so-called contraceptive culture, societies which regard children and childbearing as a nuisance, a burden and an expense, rather than a blessing....
As fewer babies are born and people live longer, we face the perfect demographic storm, with the greying of the population stressing welfare and health systems, which are funded by less tax from a shrinking workforce.
There is one more effect of oral contraceptive pills that must be addressed. And for all those who understand the crucial nature of God's command "Thou shall not kill," this should be the most important of all.
For the so-called birth control pill kills human embryos.
Perhaps not as the chemicals' first mechanism, but there are secondary effects which cause changes in the uterine lining so that if "breakthrough conception" does occur, the new life meets a hostile environment when it arrives in the uterus 6 to 10 days later. The little one cannot implant. It dies. This is, no doubt about it, an abortifacient action of the pill.
It means that for whatever other reasons one should avoid it, the potential destruction of a preborn boy or girl should put the pill way beyond consideration.
So yes, the birth-control pill is turning 50.
But an honest survey of what it has done to our culture, to the health of countless women, and to the lives of millions of unborn, unmourned children should keep us from joining the party.
