Posted on 07/18/2007 1:35:10 AM PDT by neverdem
IN May the Food and Drug Administration approved a new birth control pill, Lybrel. It is as effective at preventing pregnancy as the other pills already out there (about 98 percent) but boasts one advantage: Women who take it will never get their periods.
Lybrel is landing on pharmacy shelves this month. And now war has been declared on menstruation.
Already the first few volleys in this battle have been exchanged. Gird yourselves, women, for a barrage of advertising and research highlighting the debilitating effects of periods and the joys of menstrual suppression.
After all, periods and their mood swings are bad for family values (who wants to have a stay-at-home mom when she’s so darn cranky?), bad for women’s health (women were never meant to menstruate so much; natural selection designed their bodies for back-to-back pregnancies and breast-feeding), bad for the fashion industry (how can beige be the new black if women won’t wear it all month?) and bad for the economy (everybody knows women take to their beds at the merest whisper of “cramps,” fueling the nation’s employee-absentee rate). Western civilization, it seems, hinges on our ability to wrangle our messy cycles to the ground and stomp ’em out once and for all.
Sound absurd?
In a presentation by Lybrel’s maker, Wyeth, to investors and analysts last October, Dr. Ginger D. Constantine, the company’s therapeutic director for women’s health, laid the groundwork. Citing company-backed studies, she reported that menstruating women feel less effective at work and take more sick days. Not only that, but they don’t exercise and they wear dark clothes more often, she said.
Suddenly, news articles are weighing the pros and cons of our monthly cycles. And while it’s great that the American news media are, for a moment, challenging the culture of concealment that...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
It’s the reason why I went through with the hysterectomy. Artificial hormones are not the same as what your body produces. You’re right, in women with problems, weighing the option is the way to go. But suggesting an artificial hormone to stop periods because they are inconvenient, may be taking a totally unnecessary risk.
No drug is trouble-free for everyone. It's likely to be very helpful to some, however.
One of the main problems with all hormonal contraceptives is long-term compromised fertility. That's fine for those who never want to have children, but many are not happy with permanent infertility.
Reminds me of the movie “Children of Men”, which depicts a grim future-world of 2027 London where no woman in the world can get pregnant and Islamist gangs roam the streets.
The effect of this on demographics is something to think about.
>>One of the main problems with all hormonal contraceptives is long-term compromised fertility. That’s fine for those who never want to have children, but many are not happy with permanent infertility.<<
Nor the cardiovascular problems.
>>The effect of this on demographics is something to think about<<
The world will be filled with Catholic and Muslims, right?
That's true. I've noticed that heart disease in women has become a fashionable "cause" recently, although obesity and sedentary lifestyles are probably larger contributors to heart disease than contraceptives.
Of course, obesity, poor diet, and sedentary lifestyles also contribute to the menstrual and reproductive symptoms that hormones are prescribed to "fix."
Where do you think the leisure for civilization and all its benefits - including longevity for both men and women - came from? Not from a world where “women did not have a lot of choice when it came to a man wanting to initiate sexual activity.”
The hypothesis is that the “hidden” fertile period of human women was the force that encouraged the brighter man to stay close to home, to better ensure that her children are his. If this is true, then someone was having periods.
As I said, the woman is trustworthy. She’s also a Christian and an innovator in the abstinence movement.
Besides, as a family doctor, I’m trained to evaluate research. The early reports on this research are nearly 10 years old. Off label, women have been using OCP’s this way for at least 20 years.
I personally had an aunt stroke out after 20 years of birth control. No smoking, in good shape physically. Perhaps she is an anomaly, but I can’t see taking that risk for an inconvenience once a month.
Those who have genuine menstrual problems, fine. But for Suzy who thinks periods are “yukky”, this should be discouraged.
And I’ve known quite a few women who were on combination hormones from the early seventies until the big scare over PremPro. Some insisted on continuing, even after, because they couldn’t bear the withdrawal symptoms. It turns out that they were right:
“WHI Study of Younger Postmenopausal Women Links Estrogen Therapy to Less Plaque in Arteries - Experts Caution that Heart Disease Effects Remain Unclear”
http://www.nih.gov/news/pr/jun2007/nhlbi-20.htm
“Effect of Hormone Therapy on Risk of Heart Disease May Vary by Age and Years Since Menopause”
http://www.nih.gov/news/pr/apr2007/nhlbi-03.htm
The risk for strokes after 20 years on OCP’s is more closely related to the individuals’ risk of strokes at that age than to the length of time on the pills. And for those women at risk, a pregnancy would carry much more risk than the OCP’s.
The suppression of cycling has always made more sense to me because it’s better at controlling break through ovulation, which prevents the possibility of the medications acting as an abortifacient. With the combination meds, the risk of osteoporosis is decreased compared to the progesterone-only Depoprovera.
From what I hear, it creates menopause-like symptoms - hot flashes, lack of sexual desire, etc.
Almost makes it kinda pointless side effects aside.
Were there negatives to the hysterectomy? I am male but ask because of A-my casual interest in medicine and B-experiences of women I know.
Leisure for civilization came from agriculture. When humans were free from having to track down food on a constant basis, and turned to the tending of crops, contemplative time for those unprecedented-on-earth brains was a byproduct.
One interesting thing you mention--a man wants to be sure his children are his. My hypothesis is that in the pre-agriculture period, there was no way of even having the concept of "my son". Since mating would have occurred within small tribal groups (most probably the dominant male would have sired most of the children anyway) there would not have been "resemblance" issues.
What changed this? Agriculture, and the need to domesticate large animals to till fields. The upper body strength of men made them the natural herders and keepers of these beasts, and fences were developed to keep them penned up. Surely some prehistoric herdsmen noticed that when a female animal was kept penned up without access to a male animal of the same kind, she was "barren". Introduce a male animal into the pen, and the barrenness disappears.
Surely, this had ramifications for human breeding, as well. In order for a man to have the concept of "my son", it meant that a particular man had to have exclusive sexual access to a particular female. At that point, the concepts of virginity and monogamy became instituted.
This only happened about 10,000 years ago, give or take a few thousand. It's a very short space in the span of human evolution. Besides, even then, a female would have been partnered off to a man about the time of her first menses, and then would have stayed pregnant or breastfeeding until her death, which would likely have occurred as a result of childbirth. She wouldn't have had as many menstrual periods as modern women, who reach menarche much earlier than our society considers them ready for marriage.
We can disagree about the reasons, but it's pretty clear that women today, on average, have many more menstrual periods than women did even a couple of centuries ago.
I’m convinced that people figured it out much quicker than that. And can’t imagine a time when there wasn’t a notion - where there were notions - of “my son.”
If you believe that humans were always 100% monogamous, even back in hunter-gatherer times, then I can see where you're coming from. If we use observations of other higher primates as a guide, the offspring are raised by closely related small groups, where males don't provide significant nurturance to individual young.
How did we go from the group model to the Ozzie and Harriet model? What was the defining event or set of circumstances that led to the concept of "my son"? Would those circumstances have necessitated enforced virginity until a marriage contract, together with female fidelity that we do not observe in other higher primates?
Best thing I ever did!!!!!!!!
I now own the seven days a month that I would bleed like a stuck pig (not to be graphic), it’s stopped the upper back pain and horrible cramping. Did I mention the breakthrough bleeding? Halfway through the month. So my hubby and I had to time our “fun” very carefully.
The only negative is that once a month, my face breaks out like a teenager.
I did qualify that statement with the word, “notion.”
The higher primates are aware of the relationship of father to son.
http://icb.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/25/3/873
and
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v425/n6954/full/nature01866.html
(Behind a paywall, here’s the abstract)
Nature 425, 179-181 (11 September 2003) | doi:10.1038/nature01866; Received 15 April 2003; Accepted 30 June 2003
True paternal care in a multi-male primate society
Jason C. Buchan1, Susan C. Alberts1,2, Joan B. Silk3 and Jeanne Altmann2,4,5
1. Department of Biology, Duke University, Box 90338, Durham, North Carolina 27708, USA
2. Institute of Primate Research, National Museums of Kenya, Nairobi, Kenya
3. Department of Anthropology, UCLA, Los Angeles, California 90095, USA
4. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA
5. Department of Conservation Biology, Brookfield Zoo, Brookfield, Illinois 60513, USA
Correspondence to: Susan C. Alberts1,2 Email: alberts@duke.edu
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Abstract
Although male parental care is rare among mammals1, adult males of many cercopithecine primate species provide care for infants and juveniles. This care is often in the form of grooming, carrying, support in agonistic interactions, and protection against infanticide2, 3. For these behaviours to be interpreted as true parental care, males must selectively direct care towards their own offspring and this care must result in fitness benefits4. With the exception of males defending probable offspring from infanticide5, male primates living in multi-male, multi-female social groups have not been shown to selectively direct care towards their own offspring6, 7. We determined paternity for 75 juveniles in a population of wild savannah baboons (Papio cynocephalus) and collected data on interventions in agonistic disputes by adult males on behalf of juveniles as a form of male care. Here we show that adult males differentiate their offspring from unrelated juveniles and selectively support their offspring in agonistic disputes. As support in agonistic disputes is likely to contribute to rank acquisition and protect juveniles from injury and stress2, 3, 5, this can be considered true parental care.
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