For me, growing up, a woman’s period was a mystery. At some age (I wish I could recall what age exactly), I realized that women get periods. The information was cloaked in some kind of taboo that sex also is when you’re young. It seemed such a strange phenomena. On the other hand, if you stare closely enough at the skin on your thumb, it can seem pretty strange too.
Is a woman’s period a natural, necessary phenomena, a natural way of reducing the risk of certain diseases, as some researchers have argued and many women believe? Or is it an unnecessary fluctuation in hormones, like the appendix serving no real useful purpose, that it would be nice to avoid?
Women are soon going to have the choice of whether to avoid it. As the NY Times reports :
For many women, a birth control pill that eliminates monthly menstruation might seem a welcome milestone. But others view their periods as fundamental symbols of fertility and health, researchers have found. Rather than loathing their periods, women evidently carry on complex love-hate relationships with them.
This ambivalence is one reason that a decision expected next month by the Food and Drug Administration has engendered controversy. The agency is expected to approve the first contraceptive pill that is designed to eliminate periods as long as a woman takes it. Doctors say they know of no extra risk to the new regimen, but some women are uneasy about the idea.
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Eliminating menstruation is not a completely new concept. Women who take any kind of oral contraceptive do not have real periods. Because the hormones in pills stop the monthly release of an egg and the buildup of the uterine lining, there is no need for the lining to shed — as occurs during true menstruation.
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Still, since the advent of oral contraceptives in 1960, birth control pills typically have been designed to mimic the natural 28-day menstrual cycle to assure women using the pill that their bodies were functioning normally. The pills are usually packaged as regimens of 21 days of hormone pills and 7 inactive pills. The interruption of hormone therapy during the inactive part of the regimen induces bleeding that resembles a mild period but is, in fact, caused by unstable hormone levels.
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…. users can have unpredictable and irregular bleeding or “spotting†that is worse than with regular birth control pills. But for some women who view their periods as the natural order of things, the qualms go beyond purely medical concerns.
(http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/20/health/20period.html?ei=5088&en=8c05265873077d2e&ex=1334721600&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&pagewanted=print)
I remember reading sometime back an article on the invention of the birth control pill in which it was pointed out the inventors of the first birth control pills found that if they tried to bring it to market without having some form of menstruation discharge, they were going to have a revolt on their hands from the Catholic Church and other sources. They cleverly introduced birth control as a way to control a woman’s period, whereas really as the above article points out, women on birth control pills don’t actually have normal periods.
Is this new technology a good idea? Should it be regulated and prevented? Some would argue it’s not natural, and it avoids a necessary phenomena. It seems difficult to argue a period is literally necessary, since a technology now lets women live without it, and since women on birth control have long avoided a real period.
What people are really arguing is that it has unknown long term risks. So do all technologies. Technologies also affect different people in different ways. I’m sure this technology is no different.
Some women will try it, and like it, and some women will try it and not like it, and others will never try it and deplore it. Many different approaches to the future sounds good to me. The risks it creates, if any, should of course be studied, and made known, but I’m sure many women would like the right to evaluate those risks for themselves.
Of course the technology does not benefit me personally, since I’m a man, and men are women who have had genetic mutations leading to hormonal differences that causes them to develop very differently from women. If I understand what people mean when they use the word “nature”, nature has arguably already given me the technology to avoid a period. Arguably, human knowledge is playing catch up.
