The Case Against Birth Control Pills
We are brainwashed. We believe birth control pills are the only reasonable and viable method of contraception. We believe birth control pills are safe. This belief comes from more than 30 years of continuous brainwashing by the pharmaceutical industry to both physicians and the public. We are victims of misinformation and dangerous practices.
It starts with our teen daughters.
While it is not abnormal or uncommon for young girls to have irregular periods into their early twenties, the birth control industry would have us think otherwise. Without scientific information to the contrary, a trend has developed whereby almost every girl who goes to a gynecologist or clinic for routine examinations and has irregular periods, automatically gets placed on birth control pills. Using birth control pills to regulate periods is not necessary or safe.
Many young women in their teens and early twenties do not ovulate regularly. If you do not ovulate, you do not get a period. Periods occur naturally and normally only 14-15 days after ovulation ( release of an egg) when pregnancy does not take place. There is nothing wrong with irregular periods, they are just part of life. When ovulation doesn’t take place, menstruation does not follow.
Taking birth control pills to regulate or even eliminate your period (like the new pill, Seasonale, that has girls menstruating three times a year) is dangerous. It overrides the normal hypothalamus-pituitary- ovarian hormonal axis and leaves us open to major problems later on in life ( eg. Infertility, cancers, strokes, blood clots).
As women become sexually active, birth control pills are promoted as an only option for safe and reliable contraception. Another fallacy. They are reliable but are far from safe.
Birth control pills are synthetic hormone impostors. Not unlike Premarin, Provera and Prempro, the maligned synthetic HRT that started the change in awareness of the dangers caused by synthetic hormone replacement and changed our treatment of menopause, birth control pills are the same breed of synthetic drugs. Their goal is to override our hormonal systems and stop our bodies from ovulating. Their action prevents the egg from being released from the ovary. The periods we have while on birth control pills are not real. They are made up by artificial changes in our hormone levels caused by our master gland, the pituitary, misreading signals sent by the synthetic birth control pills and sending on erroneous messages on the ovaries. It’s like a virus in your computer, it screws up the whole system with one false sequence of information.
The results are complex and long lasting. Symptoms like weight gain, breast engorgement and tenderness, bloating, mood swings, severe PMS, headaches and loss of libido are what we experience within days or months of starting on the pill. In time, long term dangers create an even bleaker picture. Reliable and recurrent scientific studies warn of breast and liver cancer, strokes, heart attacks, blood clots and infertility.
I spend much of my time taking young and not so young women off birth control pills. Before we even get to talking about natural hormones, we must stop using birth control pills now. And not only stop for us, stop for our daughters and their daughters!
