Hormonal Birth Control….get your facts straight and then you decide if it is worth the risk
I confess, I have always been very wary of hormonal birth control. When I was a teen (ok, so it was years ago, don’t rub it in!) I intuitively knew that putting synthetic hormones into my body to stop ovulation was not a good idea. Yeah, yeah, I get the whole freedom around sex thing, not worrying about getting pregnant, etc. However, I also knew there was a price to pay for this “freedom.”
Enter me at 21 years of age and bleeding for 1 month straight. Doctor tells me I need birth control pills to “regulate” my cycle. Now I knew this was bullshit. Fake hormones can not regulate one’s cycle. They can and will stop your normal, female, hormonal cycle and replace it with a synthetic hormonally induced one. That just seemed wrong to me. Messing with Mother Nature always has repercussions!
So, in my somewhat naïve, young state… I let this modern, medicine man convince me it was the best thing for my health. He kept telling me the pill was good for me, lessened my chance of breast cancer, and all these other female cancers and ills. Despite me not believing this information to be true, I agreed to take them.
Looking back, what was I thinking? First of all, if my bleeding for 1 month was a cancer issue, the pill was not going to fix it / heal it! And, it would have only made it worse. But I caved and took the damned ortho-nuvum 7/7/7 triphasic pills. Less than a year later I started getting wicked migraines. I called this man, this wise OB/GYN MD at his home, and told him what was happening to me. (Now keep in mind, I had worked for this MD in his OB/GYN practice, loved the man!) He told me: “Stop taking them right now or you are going to have a stroke!”
Wow, take them, they are so good for you…. now STOP because this good for you hormonal pill is now going to make your brain have an infarction! I stopped and never looked back!
I have since worked in OB/GYN, Maternal-Child Health, and Health Education for 27 – 28 years (See, I told you it has been a while since I was a teen!). I have advised young women to leave hormonal birth control alone, out of their lives, find some less toxic way to prevent pregnancy.
50%, or more, of teens I worked with in public schools would tell me they had been put on birth control to regulate their cycles. Seriously? Who exactly thinks this is a good idea? The pharmaceutical companies?
We are back to the fact that these hormones stop a female’s cycle. A teen’s body has not self-regulated her cycle yet, she just started having periods! Let her body take its time to mature and get into its own rhythm!
Or, how about this thought, figure out the cause of her off beat cycles and correct it (If it actually needs correction). Don’t just cover up the symptom (irregular cycle) with fake hormones that are doing absolutely nothing to correct the symptom. Maybe she needs some whole food nutrition and healthy lifestyle education. When we care of the body in a natural way our beautiful female cycle hums along like magic.
So onward we go…
The hormonal methods are now quite numbered: pills, IUDs with hormones, shots in the butt every three months (Depo-Provera), rings to wrap around your cervix (No, this is not jewelry! It is Nuvaring), implants into the fatty tissues of your arm (Implanon or Nexplanon), a patch (Hey, like nicotine withdrawal patches… does one withdraw from sex? Just curious… Ok, it is called Ortho Evra, kind of like Elvira… mistress of the dark!), and the ominous morning after pill.
Ladies, they are all the same thing, hormones that stop (Yes, stop) your normal female cycle, the cycle nature gave your body to express the beauty of you as a woman. Any cycle you have on fake hormones is merely a hormonally induced one; not your body working naturally anymore, but the fake hormones creating a synthetic hormonal cycle. The hormones fool your body into thinking it is pregnant. Then when you stop your pills for 7 days (or take the sugar ones) you have withdrawal bleeding. On other hormonal methods, like the shot and implants, there is not a seven day break from the synthetic hormones. You more than likely won’t bleed every 28 days. You may have bleeding at random times; this is your body trying to do what nature intended it to do: bleed from the uterus.
Problems caused by synthetic female hormones in your system: high blood pressure, depression, headaches, weight gain, severe moodiness, lack of sex drive (I love this one. Women are using them to make sex more fun, more free, and they decrease sex drive… hmmm.), nausea and vomiting (remember they fake your body into thinking it is pregnant; this is fake morning sickness.), and short-term as well as lifetime infertility (That means your body loses its ability to conceive).
And they have a failure rate; that’s right, you can get pregnant despite taking them correctly.
OK, there is more problems, that may be fatal in very rare cases, include heart attack, stroke, having a blood clot in the legs – lungs -heart – or brain, or developing high blood pressure, liver tumors, gallstones, or yellowing of the skin or eyes (jaundice).
The “expert” advice is that these synthetic hormones do not raise the risk of breast cancer. Frankly, thinking about female physiology from a point of common sense, this “no cancer risk” makes no sense to me. My guess, based upon my knowledge of female physiology and hormones, is they would raise the risk of breast cancer as well as other female cancers. They are fake and doing fake things to your body.
I am grateful I started getting migraines and ended their use after less than a year. I never thought they belonged in my divine feminine body!
So now I found this book, The Pill: Are you sure it’s for you? By Jane Bennett & Alexandra Pope. I am excited to read it… just waiting for it to come from Amazon. Someone finally put words into a book to warn women that the hormones created and sold to make their sex lives free and easy might just have a dark side (We are back to Elvira here!)
Check back for an update after I finish the book… don’t hold your breath waiting. I finally started reading Harry Potter after all these years. I am 1/4 through book 5. The Pill book will be on hold for a bit. I am busy with magic!
Stay tuned for a Natural Birth Control post. I think, when we celebrate our moon cycle, our uterine bleeding, and become in tune and energized by it, natural birth control and fertility awareness is a divine feminine way to care for our reproductive organs and cycle. Wow, was that a mouthful!
Be well, love your body, love yourself for the divine female you are!
WiseWomenRedTent 