Women were lied to about the pill because a man wanted to please the Pope – what else are we not being told?
Women on the contraceptive pill know how they’re meant to take it: every day for three weeks of the month with a break so we can bleed. Or, we thought we knew.
As it turns out, the reason we’ve been told to stop taking the pill for a week each month is because one of the men working on the drug when it came out 60 years ago was a Catholic and wanted the Pope’s approval. He thought he’d get the Pope on board with oral contraceptives if it could mimic a woman’s natural cycle, still making her bleed once a month. The Pope, being the Pope, did not approve and the man renounced Catholicism, but that’s another story.
Now, the Faculty of Sexual and Reproductive Healthcare (FSRH) has said that there is no medical benefit to having that week off the pill. There is no reason – other than a man’s sanctimonious whim – to bleed each month.
In fact, the FSRH has confirmed that it’s safer to take the pill every day because it increases protection against pregnancy. From now on, NHS doctors will advise women on the pill to take it continuously.
This is a revelation for women who’ve been diligently putting up with the inconvenience of bleeding every four weeks. Anger and confusion at being lied too for so long are the dominant emotions.
I’ve been on the pill since I was 16. At some point, my family GP back in Australia told me that I could take it continuously, but I seemed to be the only one in my circle of friends who did this. Feeling guilty or unnatural or unfeminine somehow, I’d stop taking the pill every couple of months for a week, thinking perhaps I’d remind my body what it was supposed to be doing naturally. I assumed there was a medical reason to do it – and indeed when I came to the UK, an NHS doctor told me I ought to be bleeding once a month. Confused but obedient, I stocked up on tampons.
Of course, I am angry to have been misled by doctors. I am incensed that one man’s Catholic wish should dictate the way we advise millions of women on how to take extremely important medication. I am also mildly jubilant at the prospect of being able to skip my period indefinitely. But this isn’t alarming in isolation: in fact, it is symptomatic of a much larger issue and that is the wilful neglect of women’s reproductive health.
How can we possibly know so little about women’s bodies, with a medical research industry as sophisticated as ours? Is all the funding for research being funnelled into erectile dysfunction? Must we really leave women so misinformed about their reproductive organs?
Women are routinely disbelieved by doctors when they describe reproductive pain. I’ve had this experience myself: I have told multiple NHS doctors about a mysterious pain around my ovaries and was only sent for a test upon my indignant insistence. It came back clear, and despite my persistent pleas that we look at other options, I’ve just been told we don’t know what it could be and not to worry too much.
I’ve spoken to, and read about, many other women who’ve gone to doctors with similar pain and been turned away or told they’re being hysterical. We are belittled, ignored and dismissed when we simply request more information about our bodies; information that should be available to us.
We need to urgently invest in research and innovation for women’s reproductive health. We need more contraceptive options, preferably ones that have actually been designed with women’s best interests in mind. We need to utterly divorce religion from the conversation about contraception. We need to protect our access to our medication and provide women with the most up to date advice possible. We need more women to be included in the invention of products and pills for women.
We’ve just been lied to for 60 years. What else don’t we know, or aren’t we being told, about our own bodies?
