Contraceptives are all about being “safe,” right? If that’s true, why is this “essential tool” for women’s health causing everything from depression and anxiety to blood clots and strokes?
Samantha talks with journalist and editor of Natural Womanhood, Grace Emily Stark, to get the real stats on how hormonal contraceptives are effecting women’s health, alternative methods of family planning, and what we can do to get the word out about the deception in the world of women’s health.
Learn more about the risks of hormonal contraceptives and find alternative methods of family planning at NaturalWomanhood.com, or connect with Grace on her website GraceEmilyStark.com.
Episode Transcript
Ross: Yeah, I need uh… I’m just—I don’t know—I don’t understand, umm, how this happened? We-we used a condom.
Rachel: I know. I know, but y’know condoms only work like 97% of the time.
Ross: What? What? What?!! Well they should put that on the box!!!
Rachel: They do!
Ross: But hey, in my defense I-I just found out condoms are like only 97% effective.
Joey: (shocked) What?
Ross: I gotta go find her.
Joey: Whoa! Hey! Whoa!! Hold up! Are you serious?! So like 3% of the time they don’t even work?! Huh? They should put that on the box!
Ross: Evidently they do.
Samantha:
Contraception does not prevent pregnancy. This is the hard reality Ross deals with in this episode of Friends. This is the reality many pro-abortion feminists correctly apprehend as they call for sex strikes following the overturn of Roe v Wade. Every method of contraception has a failure rate. Contraception does not prevent pregnancy, it lessens its likelihood. Contraception does a lot more than that, though. Besides creating this illusion of “safe sex”, as though it's a dangerous pursuit rather than the physical culmination of love and unity, it creates the illusion of sex without consequences. It's an illusion that up until now has increasingly relied on abortion to keep its promises. Contraception has also created structures that, while perhaps opening a greater number of doors for women, has done via the requirement that women mute their fertility. The structures in place might admit more women to the table, but only if they're playing by men's rules. Meanwhile, the price of admission can be devastatingly high.
Today on the podcast, we hear from Grace Emily Stark. Grace is a journalist and the editor of the Natural Womanhood website, a resource that seeks to reveal the truth about the damages of hormonal contraceptives and connect women with resources that help them work with their fertility for family planning. We'll hear about the lies perpetuated by the pharmaceutical industry, some of the ways contraceptives remain harmful to women's health, and why in many ways women are still being lied to about how contraception affects their bodies and what alternatives they have. I'm Samantha Stephenson, and this is Brave New Us.
Season 2 Intro:
There's kind of like a missing explanation in some of the research about exactly when the child dies versus when the organs are harvested.
They have to have gotten those fetal cell lines from living fetal tissue.
It takes away the responsibility that men should also have when it comes to reproduction. You know men, it lets them off the hook.
You know, women say things all the time like “well, my body has never worked.”
Are all IUDs abortifacients? They are, every single one.
Women just need to know that, you're good. You're good the way you were created.
So they won't ever regret carrying to term.
It's wrought with places that they can go wrong and ethical traps.
Covering the world to reproductive technology, women who bear new life, the scientists who tried to create it and the perilous journeys of the embryos themselves. Welcome to Season Two of Brave New Us.
Grace:
The headlines that you see about the pill today, causing depression, breast cancer, they're not, none of this is news. They've known about it since at least 1970, if not, even prior to that and just kind of draw the lines for people that this you know, tool, supposedly a tool of empowerment that's been held up for the last half century as the key to women's liberation, has really kind of been the opposite, in a lot of ways.
Samantha:
So what are some of the risks of hormonal contraceptives? Can we spell those out?
Grace:
Yeah, so there's quite a few. The most well known ones have to do with mental health. There's been some really wide scale studies, particularly out of the University of Copenhagen, in Denmark in the last few years that have drawn some really, really strong correlations between diagnosis of mental illness and being on hormonal birth control. And not only mental illness like depression and anxiety, but suicide and attempted and even successful suicide. The correlation with hormonal birth control is really strong, especially the younger a woman is when she's on it. It's a really high correlation for teen women. So the mental health effects have been known about for a long time. You'll find stuff in the transcripts from the hearings in 1970 related to mental health effects. Cancers are another one, breast cancer. They do a lot to kind of massage the data and the statistics to make it sound like “oh, it's not as bad of a connection” or “it's not as strong as we thought”. But usually if you look into the studies, they all show the same thing. There's a very strong correlation between the use of hormonal birth control and breast cancer, certain types of breast cancers, cervical cancers as well. Now, you'll hear a lot of folks say well, but it actually decreases your risk of ovarian cancer. Okay, ovarian cancer, not to belittle it, is very rare. Anyway, it's one of the rarer cancers that women can get, and it's certainly the decrease in ovarian cancer risk that women on birth control see, arguably does not outweigh the substantial increase in risk that they get from their increased risk of breast cancer and cervical cervical cancer, especially breast cancer and considering how prevalent breast cancer has now become. Unfortunately, more recently, there's been suspicion that hormonal birth control is tied to risks of certain autoimmune disorders. And the more that they have discovered about how sex plays a role in immune functioning, so female and male immune systems operate very differently and has a lot to do with our hormonal functioning, the more that they have kind of started to figure out some of the mechanisms behind why more women seem to get immune diseases than men do. And what first, what role birth control could possibly possibly play in the triggering of certain autoimmune disorders that might already be like latent in our genetics.
Samantha:
Who is performing these studies that are showing the risks? Because I know a lot of times studies that are put out by pharmaceutical companies and paid for by foreigners, pharmaceutical companies can have different results than other more independent sources.
Grace:
Yeah, so I think in a lot of the cases, the best data we have comes from, there's a really big study on a bunch of nurses. Do you know what I'm talking about? They took a really large cohort of nurses and followed them over the course of decades. And I think that's where we have a lot of data about not just hormonal contraception in women's health. But just women's health in general. And so I think that's where a lot of women's health data has come from in the last couple of decades. Universities, like the University of Copenhagen, just kind of, you know, getting grant money to do deeper dives into particular issues, because yeah, in general, anything that a pharmaceutical company, sponsors, you know, even if the data is good, they tend to find a way to massage it in the conclusion section. And of course, that's all journalists tend to read, and they make their headlines from that and so you'll see there's just this overarching theme of any time there is a new study that comes out with any kind of data that's at all not great about birth control and its effects on women's health. You'll see every single headline has something to do with birth control that may raise the risk of blah, blah, blah. But that doesn't mean you should go out and throw your pack away, or experts say it's, you know, they just have a way of writing it. That makes you think, oh, okay, well, it's just it's not that big of a deal. I don't need to worry about it here. They're telling me, you know, the risks don't outweigh really the risks of unintended pregnancy, which for whatever reason, what our public health powers that be get to decide trumps everything, essentially. So yeah, it's very telling when you see the way these studies are treated, and headlines what the MO is, and that's just women cannot get pregnant. We have to do whatever we can to keep women from getting pregnant. That risk for whatever reason, has just been determined to outweigh anything. Cancer, mental health, possible autoimmune diseases, you know, that really runs the gamut.
Samantha:
That language tells you a lot about how our society views the natural function of women's bodies. “The risk of getting pregnant” as though it's some sort of disease or a failure or dangerous.
Grace:
Or something you like “fall into” you know, like I think of a risk as like, walking along the street and like an anvil falls on my head like a cartoon. Like that's not really how we attract the risk of pregnancy.
Samantha:
But some people do use that language, women “fall pregnant”. We don't. We don't fall pregnant. It doesn’t happen in a passive way.
Grace:
Right? Yeah, that's um that's a UK, colloquial, I've noticed, and you'll read that term in like The Guardian and kind of the UK newspapers and that sort of thing. I didn't know when or where that came about, but the first time I came across it I was like “fall pregnant??”
Samantha:
Usually. So I do have one more follow up question. You talked about the study or the hearings in the 1970s. I would imagine that the mechanisms or the exact dosage or the way that the drugs are designed has evolved and changed a little bit over the course of the 50 years. Do you know anything about Parkinson's plan at all?
Grace:
Yeah, so they figured out pretty quickly that the dosages that they were using of the synthetic hormones, so most birth control… We'll just take a step back here and explain for anybody who's not familiar with what birth control actually is. Most forms of birth control are what's known as a combined hormonal contraceptives. So that means that they've got a little bit of synthetic estrogen and a little bit of synthetic progesterone. And estrogen and progesterone are two hormones that our body naturally produces as women. And the flow and flux of those two hormones are what are responsible for a monthly menstrual cycle and our fertility. And so in delivering a constant flow dose of those hormones, synthetic versions of those hormones, or hormonal birth control, functions by suppressing your body's natural production of those naturally occurring, otherwise known as endogenous hormones. So it overrides the cycle, it overrides the natural rise and fall of what your body would normally be producing, and replaces it with this just constant low dose of these two, generally two hormones. Sometimes women, especially postpartum, or who are at risk of developing certain kinds of breast cancer, like have a genetic predisposition towards the BRCA gene. Where it's like estrogen dependent cancers postpartum because you're not supposed to have estrogen postpartum in your birth control because it can interfere with breast milk production. In those cases, will often be prescribed either a form of non hormonal birth control like the copper IUD, or what's known as the mini pill, which is progestin only, there's no synthetic estrogen. But for the most part, since the beginning, the very first iteration of the birth control pill which is from which is known as “enavid” or “enovid”. The most popular forms of hormonal birth control are combined, so a little bit of estrogen, synthetic estrogen and a little bit of synthetic progesterone. Progesterone can be used at really high high doses at first, especially in my clinical trials. So you'll see if you dig back through the clinical trials that they conducted on poor Puerto Rican women, and housing projects in Puerto Rico, they dropped all the studies very, very quickly. The side effects were almost intolerable for a lot of women. And, in fact, you know, I think up to five women died during the trials and yet, nobody bothered to investigate why and to figure it out, which is just absolutely heinous. And ever since the pill hearings, which again, were about 10 years after the pill came onto the market, they realized, okay, we’re using doses that are a little bit higher than what they actually need to be to be effective. Let's lower the dosage a little bit. And then the other outcome of the pill hearings was to also include more patient information, like patient pamphlet inserts, and warnings and that sort of thing. So the big, long, huge inserts that if you you know, unfold it 10 times it'll lay out on your table, like a map so those were some of the results of the Nelson problem hearings.
Samantha:
So aside from the health risks, are there other concerns for women who are using these things in the short term or long term?
Grace:
Yeah, I mean, the health risks are huge. The other risks are the mentality that birth control gives women about their bodies, that there's something about their body that needs to be controlled, that either they or someone else needs control of, so that they can live full, happy and productive lives. I mean, that's kind of the line right, if you're going to be a responsible young woman, especially if you're on track for college education or in college already and on track for a career. it's the responsible thing to do, right, to take this pill every day or have this device inserted, so that you can be the modern woman who is going to be unencumbered, when it comes to for romantic relationships and when it comes to pursuing her career, and if you're not on the pill, you're either some kind of weird religious nut or you're very irresponsible. And so there's just this implicit messaging that comes with that, which is that your body as a woman is not good enough or is dysfunctional or is somehow going to hold you back unless you do something to control it. And so I think that message is, in a lot of ways, just as dangerous for women as the actual health side effects because thinking about what that does to our psyche in the way that we view our bodies as women and what our bodies are designed to do. I mean, talk about a less empowering message, right?
Samantha:
Yeah, it certainly doesn't really pave the way for women to be empowered to be mothers and continue in their careers. Motherhood can sometimes be seen as a mistake or an impediment rather than something that we need to make room for, because it's something you ought to have controlled.
Grace:
Right and if you do end up pregnant before, you know the time is right, before you're supposed to be, that makes it your fault, makes the focus on you, you weren't being responsible, and you didn't do what you were supposed to do. You know, and it really takes away the responsibility that men should also have when it comes to reproduction, you know, kind of it really lets them off the hook in so many ways, because, you know, women are in control of every effective form of birth control that there is out there and so, if you as a woman have not taken advantage of that, then if you make a mistake, that's on you and if you're lucky, you might have a partner who's supportive enough to you know, tell you that it's whatever you decide and hold your hand and seems like that's kind of the best we can hope for now. One, it takes two to tango. And men historically have been encouraged to be a lot more responsible when it comes to the results of intimate relationships.
Samantha:
Yeah, I definitely think that that reflects the way that our society views someone, a woman who gets pregnant at an inopportune time. But I wonder if that's based, that attitude is based, on sort of a more fundamental mistaken assumption that we have the kind of control that contraception gives us the illusion of thinking that we do.
Grace:
I think that is a really excellent point. Yeah. Because we are given and in a lot of ways, I think that that's where the connection between abortion and birth control use comes into play because a very high proportion of women who seek abortions are on some form of you know, birth control, whether it's hormonal or otherwise, prior to, you know, getting pregnant unexpectedly. And then seeking out an abortion as a result. And I think that's where that connection comes in. Because it's well, I did the responsible thing. I took control in the way I was told I was supposed to take control. So why should I have to pay the price? You know, with this unintended, unplanned pregnancy? You know, now the next most responsible thing to do is to avail myself of an abortion. And it does come back to that idea of we have this onus on us as women to control our fertility. By you know, arguably just because of the existence of things like birth control, and abortion.
Samantha:
That's interesting. So we like back in medieval medieval theology, women were viewed as these lustful, fleshy creatures and and their bodies were very much viewed with suspicion, whereas women, as far as we can tell, really connected spiritually with their faith through their bodies and through this fleshness, I guess if we want to call it that but it seems like in some ways, things have shifted dramatically, obviously, since the Middle Ages, but, but in other ways, not so much because there's still this antagonism of the powers or those who are in power in society with women's bodies.
Grace:
Yeah, definitely. I mean, it's just kind of an modern form of, of that suspicion of women and our women in the wild and you know, what our bodies are capable of, and in a better time, in a better culture, we would you know, revere a woman's ability to carry life within her and then all that entails. But like you've pointed out and kind of our darker times we've been really suspicious of it and sought to control it and in seeking to control you know, fertility and reproductive capacity. We're controlling women, we're drugging them with these pills from the time they start menstruating. Until, you know, they decide they want to get pregnant in their late 20s or 30s. We've raised whole generations of women who don't know who they are. I don't know what the experience of life is outside of being on these pills or being you know, having these devices inside of them for decades. And one really interesting book on that is this is, Your Body on Birth Control by Dr. Sarah Hill. She's an evolutionary biologist, and she's done some really, really fascinating research about the effect that the pill has on women's brains, on their perceptions of themselves and the world around them. And she said, both in her own experience and in the experiences of women who she studied, that there's just this prevailing thought that when you're on birth control or experience rather than when you're on birth control, it's like experiencing life in like black and white. And when you get off of birth control, all of a sudden, it's like, whoa, the world is, there's color. I react differently to different situations. Whereas before I just kind of had this like one note. I thought I was just this like, chill, blah blah kind of person. But it turns out I you know, affected differently by music, by art by by different kinds of men by you know, there's just this lenses come off the veil is lifted kind of moment for a lot of women when they come off of birth control and for women who've been on it for, you know, their entire adolescence or young adulthood. That feeling of what have I missed out on like, in my life while on this, I mean, I think that's, that's just really tragic. And we've raised literally like generations of women who've had this experience.
Samantha:
I remember being a part of that generation of women as a teenager and being told that this pill or this patch was the solution to the painful periods that I experienced. So this is the thing that's going to solve that for you. And I also remember students coming to me when I was teaching religion and saying, this is what this is what I'm going through. This is what I'm being told by my doctors and my mother, and it was the same experience for me as a young woman in Catholic school, the only person who raised any concerns in my life about being on these kinds of drugs was my Catholic school religion teacher and I was very suspicious of her because my mother thought it was a good idea. My doctor didn't have anything to say about any kind of risk. And so when I was teaching and being met with similar suspicion, I had a lot of sympathy because that was my experience as well. But why do you think there seems to be such a lack of awareness and even suspicion surrounding these issues for people who are bringing it up?
Grace:
Well, issues of risk, your mental health, is pointed out you know, when you do hear somebody saying anything, you know, against birth control. It kind of puts your back up especially if you're already on it, because it's just accepted as this just like overwhelmingly safe, overwhelmingly positive thing for women. A lot of that has to do with the way it's been built from the very beginning, which, when it first got initial approval on the market, back in 1959, it wasn't as a contraceptive, it wasn't for preventing pregnancy. It was for menstrual irregularities. That was what it was first approved to do. Because they noticed when women were on it, you know that they, a lot of them had a positive experience in terms of lighter periods and that sort of thing. And obviously, because it overrides your cycle it gave women the feeling, the appearance of having a more regulated cycle because they would bleed on time at the same time, every month, and where we've been taught that is the pill working to regulate your cycle, that's not true. It's actually completely overwriting your cycle and then giving you a break through bleed when you take a sugar pill in the pack every month and of course it comes at the same time every month because you're taking that placebo pill at the same time every month. They didn't think that that was either relevant or that women needed to know, that was where they didn't want them to know that that was what was actually going on. They just told them and you know, take it and it'll help with you know, menstrual irregularity and all this stuff. And so from the very beginning, even before it was marketed specifically as a contraceptive, starting in 1960, it was held up as this like, you know, just an all purpose Women's Health pill that would just solve everything. Because a lot of women have had the positive experience of regulated cycles. If it was really irregular before and that sort of thing, they get really defensive when they hear anything about it because they've been told and they've even experienced, you know, some benefits from it.
Samantha:
Have you as a journalist ever experienced that when you tried to bring some of these things into the light, and you have pieces that you write, do you ever get pushback or suspicion about those?
Grace:
Oh, yeah. Oh my gosh, all the time. Women get so defensive when you write anything at all negative about birth control, and I think they see it especially women who might be Catholic or you know, religious. I think they see it as an attack on their morals or something, I'm not sure or it just doesn't live up to either their experience or what they've been taught to expect about birth control. I'm not sure where it comes from. But yeah, I do receive a ton of pushback you usually from women who have issues like PCOS or Polycystic Ovary Syndrome or Endometriosis, you know, who had really painful really irregular, just terrible cycles prior to going on birth control, that you know, birth control really seemed to alleviate those symptoms for them. So they had a regular cycle. They weren't doubled over in pain. Every time their period came, that sort of thing and they get really defensive when you point out that birth control is a bandaid for those issues that it doesn't actually get to the root cause it doesn't actually heal anything. And not only that, but that it might be having some unsavory side effects that they haven't themselves noticed yet or, you know, that they might not notice until the long term because I think they're so focused on the fact that they're getting relief now, which I cannot blame them for one bit. Especially when you're told as a young woman by your doctor, you know, if you want to go on the pill, this is all I have to do for you. You're just going to be in pain unless you go on the pill. And your mom too is telling you “okay, let's just do this because you know, you're going to be able to go to school again, you're going to be able to participate in sports again”. And it comes down to the fact that women are just willfully ignorant of exactly how the pill functions. You know, of course, you're not going to have menstrual irregularity. Do you have a menstrual cycle anymore? But we're not told that when we're put on the pill and either doctors don't really understand how it works themselves and just prescribe it as their bread and butter or they don't think it's relevant or important that it works the way it does. And so what we're left with is just any kind of questioning of it as well then you're taking away every option that women have to live normal, healthy, productive lives, especially if they have something really debilitating like PCOS or endometriosis. And for those of us who are in the reproductive health community, fertility awareness community or restorative reproductive medicine, whatever you want to call it, we know that that's not true. We know that there are better options available to women to treat these issues that actually get to the underlying causes. There are different surgeries available to women who have PCOS and Endo. There are different kinds of therapeutic drug options that allow women to still cycle but can help with some of the pain that they're having. There are other options, but unfortunately, most OBGYN ones that you'll visit are not trained in them at all and all that they've been taught to do really is prescribed birth control for these issues. And so that's what they do, because that's the biggest best tool in their arsenal as far as they're aware.
Samantha:
It's so interesting, though, I mean, I can definitely sympathize as somebody who suffered with endometriosis that the need to have relief, and being grateful that there is a drug that you can take, but it seems to me that there has to be a little bit more going on there. Just mentally, psychologically, because if you had another medical condition and you were taking drugs that your doctor prescribed to you for this medical condition, and then you found out or someone brought to your attention, that there was some kind of risk associated with that drug that you weren't previously aware of, or even that was harmful that you didn't know about. Most people in most of those cases tend to if they have anger or or whatever it is towards the pharmaceutical company or or they would just go off that drug. They don't usually turn around and then defend that drug. And so it makes me think, but there must be it must be tied up in the sexual morality that comes along with it. Because otherwise why would you continue to defend a drug if you are presented with scientific evidence and not a moral argument? You know, what's the motivation there?
Grace:
Yeah, I don't know. There's just so much going on there because you know, if you are a mom, who has a daughter who's really suffering from really painful periods, like you're picking her up, you know, a couple days a month she's missing school, she's missing hanging out with friends, she's can't go to practice, and any young woman, any woman who's listening to this can relate to that, you know, and if you're a mom and have a daughter who's experiencing this, then you know, maybe she's also 15 and she has her first boyfriend and you have all these really high hopes for her future and you mostly trust her but you just want to kind of have some, you know, safeguards in place, then maybe you are going to be a little bit more apt to put her on the pill, instead of doing some digging into, you know, some other alternatives because in the back of your mind, you're thinking, “well, I'm kind of killing two birds, with one stone here,” you know, I can see having that feeling is a mom, especially, you know, you and I, like our moms were raised in a generation where everybody was on the pill and going back as far as probably our grandmothers were just kind of taught that this is just kind of what you do, and it's kind of how you stay safe and responsible. And here's the benefit of “oh, her skin is going to clear up, she won’t be complaining about her acne and you know, I won't have to be picking her up from school she'll be able to enjoy more time at school and with friends if she's not doubled over in pain” for a week, every month, which you hate to see as a mom as well. So I think for a lot of people, there is that idea of there's there's more than just the benefit of the regular cycle that we're giving our daughters and it kind of comes back to what we were talking about before and that idea of well, this is something we kind of need to be on top of anyway, we need to kind of control this. We need to make sure and control it, basically.
Samantha:
So we're starting to see the language of medicine changing to erase women for example, “pregnant people” or “bodies with vaginas.” Do you think this shift is in women's best interest? Or what might be some of the problems with changing medical language in this way?
Grace:
I have a lot of issues with it. I feel like it does do a lot to erase women. And it's odd because you don't, I have not seen, maybe you have, you can correct me, I haven't seen anybody referring to “bodies with penises” or “bodies that ejaculate,” I haven't seen that language anywhere. And so it doesn't feel to me, when people say that they're using the “bodies with vaginas” or “bodies that menstruate” language to be inclusive, I don't believe them because I haven't seen the language being taken in the other direction at all anywhere. Maybe that's because I travel more in women's health spaces. But I have a feeling that the vast majority of it is being done in one direction and not the other. And so I have a big problem with that, especially when people say that it's coming from a place of inclusivity because to me, it's just being used to erase women. And we have had such a problem we've been fighting for so long to even have women recognized in healthcare as women, and not only healthcare but especially in health care research and medical research. To have people not only recognize women, but set them apart in terms of research because for so long women have been treated as small men when it comes to medical care and medical research, which is why I think like 80% of the drugs that are eventually taken off the market are taken off because of adverse events in women specifically, and it's because historically and this has really only started to change in like the last 10 years or so. Historically women have been totally under-studied when it comes to drugs and medical interventions and even things like the signs of heart attacks. You know, women's heart attacks have gone unrecognized in ERs forever because women present differently with heart attacks but doctors are really trained to recognize the signs in men a lot of the time. And so for so long, we just kind of treated women as small men who have the same health needs the same health risks as men do, whose bodies are going to react the same way to pharmaceuticals. And by and large that has not not been the case and it sends women's health back in a lot of a lot of different ways. And so, it feels to me like this language of bodies with vaginas or people who menstruate is a giant step backwards from where we need to be moving, which is towards more differentiation between men and women in medicine and in pharmaceutical research, more recognition of inherent differences in our biology, and why it's important and why it needs to be set apart and studied differently and intelligently. Especially when it comes to the effects of you know, women's fertility and women's cycles on different aspects of our health. So even though we're seeing more sex parity, in recent pharmaceutical studies, so meaning equal numbers of men and equal numbers of women. What we're seeing, and we saw this with the COVID research trials is that there's still a requirement for women in lot of research to be on the pill. And there are, you know, there are reasons behind that that you can justify, a big one being obviously that if someone were to get pregnant while they're in a research study and not knowing what the effects could be on an unborn baby of a novel drug, you know, wanting to kind of protect babies from that the pharmaceutical company kind of wanting to, you know, do their due diligence and make sure that they're not inadvertently testing on fetuses basically. So there's some justifiable reason behind it, but a whole lot of time, the overarching reason for having women on the pill in research is actually because women who cycle are a lot more difficult to study. Our cycles interfere with the testing of pharmaceuticals because women who are in different phases of their cycle, have different hormonal makeup. And that throws a lot more variability, that just throws another kind of wrench into things. At least that's how researchers see it when they're trying to get data on drugs that they're researching. And so by and large, the solution there is just well, we won't test on women who are cycling, we'll put them on the pill. That way, we're not dealing with the ebb and flow of estrogen and progesterone. We know that they're going to have this same hormonal profile throughout the month because they're getting that low dose of estrogen and progestin, the synthetic versions, from the birth control.
Samantha:
In some ways, though, I think that's sort of irresponsible science. Yes, to protect the unborn, yeah, that is obviously very important. But if you're, if you're controlling that variable, then you're getting a less randomized sample in there, huge populations of women who are not on the pill, so all of those women are being done a disservice and we're not actually sure what happens or if there is some kind of interaction there.
Grace:
So if you're a woman who cycles naturally and isn't on the pill, you know, what, if any effects are you going to see from this vaccine, from this drug? Well, we can guess but we don't actually know because we didn't test on any women. You know, if you're lucky enough to find a trial where they tested on women, you know, you can almost guarantee that the women that they tested on are either, you know, menopausal, so they're not cycling anymore. Or if they were young and fertile, they were on the pill. And so their hormonal makeup, their chemical makeup is going to be different. It poses some really big issues with women's health and when it comes to especially novel, novel drugs and that sort of thing. And so again, when we are taking this step towards erasing women essentially just calling them “bodies with vaginas”, “bodies that menstruate,” it's just a giant step in the wrong direction where we should be looking towards more differentiation and more recognition of the importance of that differentiation. Rather than, you know, basically just saying, “oh, all our bodies are the same.”
Samantha:
This discussion makes you wonder whether there's a big push to have medical records, reflect whatever chosen pronoun a patient might, might prefer to on the paperwork. But it seems like especially if we're looking at something like a heart attack, that the actual biology is very, very relevant to the medical treatment. So do you think there's a problem with that?
Grace:
Yes, absolutely. There's a problem with it. It is going to prohibit doctors from providing the right kind of care for the right kind of body that they're treating. If we can't agree that male and female bodies are meaningfully different, and we don't recognize and treat them accordingly. Then it's going to result in subpar care being provided at the end of the day. You know, if you have a patient who comes in, who tells you that they're male, and they're, you know, you know, intense cramping in their abdominal cavity and bleeding and you don't know that they're biologically female. You could be dealing with somebody who has an ectopic pregnancy, who could die. And there's this very, very relevant piece of information that as a doctor, you're missing you don't even know that you need to be, you know, checking for, and they're examples in the opposite direction too. And so, with this eraser of, you know, the the differentiation between male and female, there's, there's just no good that can come of it when really we should be moving in the opposite direction of recognizing the differences in their bodies, and how important they are especially when it comes for proper and dignified care.
Samantha:
So interesting, too, because I have been hearing recently about this effort to study different different racial populations with their specific genetics and the treatment on their specific genome and how those things interact. And so it seems like the push towards that differentiation is there, and good in that context, but then the influence of the politics to erase that for women is deeply troubling.
Grace:
Yeah, absolutely. So I really get, my back really gets up as not only a woman and not only as a pregnant woman. You know, I keep getting called a “pregnant person”. And that really puts my back up because especially as somebody in the women's health space, you know, to my mind, we should be really working in the other direction to recognize the important differences between male and female bodies, and that's where progress is going to be made. And authentic women's health and we're taking a giant step backwards.
Samantha:
Yeah, you want to erase our fertility and erase the word woman. It's like, trying to, instead of achieving equality by actually affirming and lifting up and supporting the things that are uniquely women, it's an effort to achieve sameness, by making women more like men and to conform to a male standard and suppressing those things that are really feminine.
Grace:
Yeah, yeah, it's changing women to fit the normative body. Which is to say, the male body. That's the underlying message there.
Samantha;
Well, thank you so much for your time and your thoughts and your breath. Is there anything else we haven't discussed today that we should add or that you would like to add or comment on?
Grace:
If I was gonna add anything, it's just the importance of educating women and educating their doctors about what hormonal birth control is and what it does. We have a petition at Natural Womanhood right now that goes through all of the evidence based, It's an extensive scientific literature review that goes through all of the evidence based risks and side effects of hormonal birth control that you know, frankly, most people just are completely unaware of. And I think the more information we can get into the hands of women and their doctors about it, the more potential we have to make meaningful change happen in women's health. And there are some organizations that are doing good work, and medical schools, FACTS, The Fertility Awareness, Collaborative to Teach the Science, I believe, is what that acronym stands for. They're actually going in and trying to change the med school curriculum to be more comprehensive when it comes to fertility education for doctors. And not only that, but you know how, how hormonal birth control works and what the alternatives are, that actually get women to cycle the way that they're supposed to rather than shutting down their cycles. And why the female cycle is so important for female health and development. And the big takeaway is that doctors and women and girls need to understand that their period is not an accessory, that it's an important aspect of their health, and that their period health is really a fifth vital sign. And that if we take it for the vital sign that it is there's a lot that we can do to improve women's health authentically. Yeah, and that our fertility by extension is a feature and not a bug of our system as women.
Samantha:
As much as women are being used by the pharmaceutical companies and misled by what are probably well meaning doctors, this is also happening on the other end of fertility, where women want to get pregnant. They can't. As doctors become increasingly involved in the conception of children, creating life is becoming quite the industry. But what if there's a better way to help women become mothers, one that doesn't involve 1000s of dollars in treatments, or the discarding and freezing of embryos? What if instead of making women a science project, doctors could just fix the problem. That's next time on Brave New Us. This episode is sponsored by my book, Reclaiming Motherhood from a Culture Gone Mad, available now for preorder. If you're enjoying the podcast, don't forget to leave a review. Special thanks to Ellie Osmer and Jessica Gearheart for her original track, “All Will Be Well”. For more on these topics and to support the podcast visit faithandbioethics.com. You can sign up there for my newsletter for free, or consider subscribing. The podcast is supported by listeners like you!