Beware harmful side effects, including sexual enslavement

A half century after its launch, has the popular contraceptive pill really liberated women?

EARLY last week I read a piece that prompted me to send a congratulatory email to its author, Leslie Cannold, a well-known pro-choice feminist, who is part of a reproductive advocacy group.

The subject of her piece in The Age was the coming 50th anniversary of the launch of the contraceptive pill. Cannold and other women from diverse backgrounds are beginning to ask questions.

Such as -- is the widespread use of this drug, the only one invented and marketed for well people, as harmless as we are always told?

The role of drug companies in marketing the pill and other hormone-based drugs to well women is not a new complaint. Anyone who read the article in The Australian this month about John Eden and his experiences with alleged manipulation by the Wyeth pharmaceuticals company of his research into hormone-replacement therapy and breast cancer, might have heard alarms.

Marketing a hormonal drug around the fallacious concept of turning a natural phenomenon such as menopause into a disease is not new. Nor is it a new ploy to boost the drug by claiming efficacy in treating or preventing unrelated complaints (which may or may not occur), by careful manipulation of research . Nor is it new to vilify the critics as Luddites or fundamentalist religious nuts, as I know. They have been doing it for 50 years with the contraceptive pill.

Consequently, even though the pill has been linked to deep-vein thrombosis and enhanced risk of stroke and thyroid problems, and it is contra-indicated for women with migraines and liver problems and has been linked in many studies to enhanced risk of breast cancer and cervical cancer, we are still told it can have a "protective" effect in some circumstances against some other cancers such as the much rarer ovarian cancer. This is also despite the fact its use is no preventive against sexually transmitted diseases and could worsen the spread of papilloma virus, which causes cervical cancer.

The proved risk factors, we are told, are purely statistical, although the so-called protective factors, which are statistically even smaller, are made much of.

So we get bizarre statements like this from the co-author of a recent research study: "Young women don't have to worry about cancer from taking the pill because the eventual reduction in ovarian cancer is bigger than any increase in other types of cancer caused by the pill." Hmm.

But in 2007 a type of oral contraceptive was removed from the US market because of the risk of thrombosis. Despite the reassurances of drug company-funded studies, women are experiencing side effects and beginning to worry about artificial hormones. There has been a huge rise in breast cancers and women are voicing their worries on blogs and internet sites. Last October, London's The Sunday Times had a piece titled "Is the pill harmful?" about side effects.

What is more, the pill can have a disastrous unintended effect on a relationship. Because it interferes at a fundamental level with our sex hormones, it is no secret that it can kill a woman's libido. According to research at Monash University there is evidence of a correlation between the rise in use of anti-depressants in women and the pill.

It seems women are still being told: "There, there, dear, just take your pill." But when women were presented with the overwhelming evidence of the dangers of HRT, for example, they dropped it.

So why, if the pill has so many question marks over its safety, don't young fertile women insist on dropping it? Are women gullible or have we been lulled into a false sense of security by a medical profession that in contraceptive issues treats a 13-year-old girl the same as a grown woman, and prescribes the pill because (as many have admitted to me) it's easy, and perhaps believes an informed woman might not want the pill.

Why are more women not informing themselves? Women who pride themselves on their independence, a supposed result of the sexual revolution the pill itself initiated, are still swallowing a cocktail of hormones that has as its only purpose the suppression of the most delicately balanced part of our endocrine chemistry.

The irony is obvious. So is the answer. Because the pill works well as a contraceptive, it has a weird catch 22 effect on women's choices. Because the pill is effective, women did not gain independence in 1960: just another type of slavery. Women graduated from the slavery of multiple child births to the slavery of obligation to be always sexually available, and never to suffer the newly declared disease of unintentional pregnancy.

Frankly, the pill was the best invention men could have thought of for themselves. Rather than the contraceptive pill giving women independence, it made them solely responsible for contraception and took all the onus off men. Where once it was considered honourable for the male to accept his responsibilities, abortion or lone motherhood rapidly became the only alternatives for unmarried girls with pregnancies. Married women were now caught in the tyranny of the rigidly planned family. Hence the rise in abortions.

Over the past 50 years, there was another unintended cultural effect of infertility. It was assumed the pill would be used to space children apart, not almost eliminate births as it has in so many parts of Europe. So now we live in a society that can no longer reproduce itself.

Fifty years ago the pill was marketed like a lovely package of independence tied with the beautiful bow of sexual freedom. But after 50 years many women have found to their detriment that just like a series of empty boxes, one inside the other, there was nothing inside -- but an empty box.