So I was watching Survivor last night and there was a commercial for one of those drugs for women which advertise birth control PLUS fewer periods. This particular drug promised only 4 periods a year and only listed the following few side effects:
While you get 4 periods a year, you’re also more likely to have bleeding or spotting between periods. This can be slight to a flow like a regular period and should decrease over time. Like other birth control pills, SEASONIQUE® has serious risks, which can be life threatening. They include blood clots, stroke, and heart attack. Smoking increases these risks, especially if you are over 35, so Pill users should not smoke.
Maybe...no...I AM biased because I don't have the discomfort of having a monthly visitor. However, is this the type of thing you really want to mess with? I don't know. Maybe it's different for women. Every guy I know would love an improvement to current birth control for men. But if you told me I might have spotting, increase my risk of heart or stroke or may have issues with blot clots I don't think I know many men who would take it. First, there's the fear in the back of your head that "what if?" What if after taking the drug I can't reverse it when I stop taking it? What if after taking if I can never have children? Hell, we aren't even the child bearers and these thoughts go through our heads. How do you, as a woman, get past this fear? What if something goes wrong? Is it worth the risk of being left barren?
I just know that from a guy's perspective, we love it when you take birth control into your hands because if we had to take a pill that made us only "flow" four times a year we would go nuts. That being said, things happen for a reason and nature has showed us time and time again that when we try to outsmart the body, nature outsmarts us. A perfect example would be the growing tolerance to antibiotics since doctors now prescribe antibiotics to patients for the common sniffle in order to receive their hefty check from the pharmaceutical companies.
Hey, if you're never going to have kids, hate people in general or just think the world is too populated, then good luck. Get back to me in 10 years and let me know if this worked out for you. For everyone else, well...maybe you should think about how your body will try to adapt after you suppress a natural bodily function for months and years on end. The body has an uncanny ability to evolve when it believes it needs to. What if your bodily "core" (for lack of a better word) thinks that something is wrong and tries to adapt - to evolve. Maybe you start growing eggs in your ears or something? Hey, you never know how the body will adapt when if feels threatened and one lifetime is certainly not enough to provide accurate info on any drug.
If you're on one of these drugs and it's working for you, good. But I know most men wouldn't try it because we don't want anyone messing with our "junk."
That's what I was thinking today.
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3 comments:
If the choices are coma, stroke or kids, I'm taking the coma, stroke, heart attack and liquid fire shooting out of the orifice of your choice before kids. After all, diseases don't marry bitches you can't stand and forget to call you on Mother's Day.
A couple of thoughts:
1) Women are likely to accept the risks of birth control because among other things, the economic, educational, and vocational consequences of having an unplanned pregnancy can be devastating.
2) I don't think that birth control that allows for fewer periods could be considered "outsmarting the body." In fact, in true nature before birth control, a woman would likely be pregnant or nursing much of her life and have fewer periods anyway. You could just as easily argue that birth control that results in fewer periods restores the female body to its natural state, before birth control resulted in 12 periods a year.
Anon,
I completely agree with your 1st point. Unfortunately, it seems that while we claim equality of the sexes, anything that relates to salary, schooling, and all vocational issues are "somehow" beyond our ability to make equally flexible for women. I guess we just have to continue working on this. As much as I hate to admit it, if men gave birth, I guarantee we'd have day care centers at all businesses.
I see your point on the second issue but still have a disagreement. Nature has a way to outsmart us when we try to outsmart it (look at how we are becoming more resistant to antibiotics). If nature's 1st option is giving birth regularly to maintain the survival of the species and option 2 is 12 periods, then a pill which changes this doesn't exactly return the body to the status quo, it just adds a 3rd option. It gives women another option, I just wonder down the line what the consequences will be. Maybe the female body will mutate in the opposite direction and stop fertilizing monthly eggs altogether. Or (more probable than not) nothing will happen and the body will just adjust to it as a temporary change. I don't know the answer. I guess time will tell.
Thanks for your comments, I enjoy reading other opinions and possibilities.
Tave
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