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In our country where contraceptive pills are urged, encouraged, hammered
through advertisements and even glamorized by career women, there's a bigger
chance that more women will be caught in the quagmire of diseases. What is often
dubbed as the "convenient pill" could infact be the bitter pill". Bitterness is not only a
condition of the taste, it is also an adjective for an agonizing psyche. Today, many women are in this bitter predicament. Worse, as they wrestle with the sideeffects of
pills, the public seems not to notice their plight.
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Contraceptive pills have been available for 30 years now and yet the problems and side effects are still mounting, infact often hidden from the unsuspecting user. As what Prof John Guillebaud of London's Margaret Pyke Center affirmed "when we say the 'pill' is safe, we don't mean it is safe free." In other words, the pill is not safe and for 30 years, millions of women around the world were victims or were unwitting participants in one giant experiment. John Wilks, an Australian pharmacologist in his book "A Consumer's Guide to the Pills and Other Drugs" draws a number of studies which show the capacity of the pill to pollute women.
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Oral contraceptives showed that it has an abortifacient capacity. Ovulation is not always suppressed with pill. What happens is that the fertilized ovum, a new human being, is prevented from implanting in the lining of the womb. Forty out of 100 women using progesterone only or mini-pill do ovulate, and 5-10 of them confirm pregnancy. This figure is quoted from Family Planning Association in Australia. As calculated by Mr Wilks, pharmaceutically induced abortions of undetected pregnancies occur in up to 30-50 per 100 women.
The relationship between the pill and both the cancer of the breast and cervix is now well established in medical literature. And for these types of cancer. It is the young women using the pill who are most at risk. It is also the case that pill acts as a carcinogenic substance independent of any genetic predisposition a woman may have.
Blood clots are another side effects of the pill. This is confirmed from the brillant work of Sir Richard Doll and Dr. M.P Vessey in Oxford published in British Medical Journal, and this has been confirmed many times since. There are long list of interesting minor complications which women should be told about: coronaries and high blood pressure, skin pigmentation, gingivitis (bleeding from the gums), jaundice, baldness, sterility for various reasons, depressions. Visual defects, breastfeeding problems and among other things.
The quest to outwit one of the most intricate and delicately balanced parts of nature - the female reproductive system - seems to know no bounds. Scientists work relentlessly to get women's bodies under control, with some horrifying results. Depo-provera is one example. This contraceptive is an injection. Depo-provera has serious effects on bones, making young women more prone to osteoporosis in the menopause. A recent report also showed a 360% increase in the breast cancer for long time users who started young. The long-term bombardment of young healthy bodies with powerful artificial hormones amounts to polluting women.
The move to make the pill available over the counter, just like condoms in grocery stores, without a prescription from doctors may pose bigger problems. An American report has shown the damage caused to unborn babies when women continue to take the pill when they are pregnant, a situation which would almost certainly increase if women did not have to see a doctor.
Certainly governments and pharmaceutical manufacturers need to issue better and fuller information on the side effects of the drug products. After all, if the pharmaceutical industry are to be treated like the tobacco industry and are held responsible for their products we could almost see a vast change in the attitudes to women. (Source: Human Concern, Auturmn 1997/46)
by lanessa V. Ang-Ramirez, M.D.
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