“Natural” Woman??
Saturday, January 21st, 2006About a year ago (I think), Barr Pharmaceuticals introduced Seasonale, a new kind of birth control pill that extends the time between menstrual periods so that a woman only has four per year. The concept itself isn’t new—women taking the traditional Pill have known for ages that if a “regularly scheduled” period is going to be unusually inconvenient (e.g., going on vacation that week), all you have to do is skip the placebo week and vóila—no period! Barr simply refined this idea and made it medically feasible and, according to the FDA, safe.
Reaction to Seasonale has been surprisingly varied—many women, including Sex in the City creator Candace Bushnell, celebrated the new pill as a breakthrough in women’s quality of life. “Let’s face it,” said Bushnell, “women do complain about their periods…. The reality is if you ask women about having their period four times a year instead of thirteen they are very interested in this option of having fewer periods.” This is also her: “When you think about what women have accomplished with 13 periods a year, think about what we can accomplish with only four.”
So what’s the downside? Many women have raised both medical and sociological concerns about Seasonale and about menstrual suppression in general. Dr. Susan Rako (author of the book No More Periods? The Risks of Menstrual Suppression) points out that menstruation allows women’s bodies to get rid of excess stored iron, which many doctors believe to be the reason that women in their reproductive years tend to have fewer heart attacks and strokes than men. For another, the hormones that regulate menstruation are also critical for helping women build and maintain bone mass; some doctors fear that suppressing a woman’s natural cycle may lead to increased risk of osteoporosis at younger ages.
Then there’s the sociological angle. As Rako puts it, “We’re not just talking about doing away with menstruation. We’re talking about doing away with women’s normal hormonal menstrual cycle, which is really responsible for what fundamentally makes a women a woman.” Liz Gettelmen, a former varsity crew and basketball player for Harvard University, wrote an amazing editorial about this very issue. In her view, promoting Seasonale via the promise of ridding oneself of the burden of monthly periods perpetuates the view that menstruation is “potent, damning and gross,” and all-around undesirable.
Some opponents of Seasonale have called reducing a woman’s periods to four a year “unnatural,” to which its proponents respond that the clockwork, artificially-created, twenty-one-on-seven-off “pill period” is just as unnatural—in fact, barring hormonal regulation, how often women get their periods and how long they last varies tremendously. Gettelman points out in her article, however, that having a period every month year in and year out is itself “unnatural”—what our bodies are best suited to in evolutionary terms is serial pregnancy, because of which our ancestors normally only had about 50 periods over the course of a lifetime rather than the 500 experienced by modern women. So what is “natural,” really, anyway?
Further Reading:
Skipping Periods: The Pros, The Cons, The Science