Tuesday, August 07, 2007

Birth control pill FDA-approved to rid of periods

The title link will take you to an article in which you hear reactions of how unnatural it is not to have regular menses.
Here is a 2000 New Yorker -- long! -- piece about the arbitrary inclusion (based on his beliefs rather than any hard science) of the placebo week by the creator of the Pill. In section 2 in the article, an anthropologist visiting a preindustrial village in Mali noticed that women were pregnant a lot, not menstruating. She posits that frequent menses for most of a woman's reproductive stretch is actually evolutionarily abnormal/unhealthy -- not absurd considering the cancer risk to ovaries (damage to wall) and endometrium (estrogen stimulating growth) during ovulation.
The article wraps up tracking development of a pill that mimics low-hormone menopause rather than high-hormone pregnancy, not the one above that's just hitting market.

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