Lybrel is a drug soon to be licensed by America’s food & drug administration. It is designed to banish menstruation in women and thus the pain and mood swings often associated with enduring the fertility cycle each month. In the UK the drug will be known as Anya and is widely expected to be granted a license for use here also.
Obviously the medication will allow women to join Kangaroos in being able to turn off and on fertility as and when required rather than entering the cycle whether needed or not. The arguments over the possible health risks will no doubt continue but it’s a safe bet that many women will be only too happen to take control of menstruation in this way and take the risk anyway. There may well be health risks though even aspirin has a health risk and very little in our lifestyles today is entirely natural. The future certainly holds very many controversial possibilities with the recent announcement involving the possibility of fertilisation for women without sperm and now this possibility of turning off the fertility cycle.
Religion is no doubt going to have another enormous hissyfit over this and they are entitled to their view of the world but whether this latest pill is successful or not will depend on how many women want this degree of control and the longer term health risk findings.
Surveys undertaken in the US have shown that as many as two thirds of women expressed a serious interest in giving up their monthly period.
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A pill to banish menstruation « Stuffem-Up the hill backwards
Control over our own bodies? More like pharmaceutical control over our bodies. To me it’s just another example of the traditionally paternalistic medical establishment trying to convince women that their bodies are untrustworthy and have to be medicalized. Just over a hundred years ago menstrual flow was characterized as something dangerous according to Jalland et al 197? (I wrote a sociology paper that cited that book), only now saying so has become a lot more socially acceptable.
Think about it: most women now give birth in a medical setting. Why? We’ve become brainwashed into believing that even completely normal pregnancy and childbirth is a pathological condition that somehow will trainwreck without medical interference.
We started formula feeding our babies because medical “experts” told us that formula was “scientifically superior”, while our bodies couldn’t be trusted to produce the right food, unlike EVERY OTHER MAMMALIAN SPECIES.
And now we are being led to view our periods as an abnormal annoyance. I can’t help but wonder how well a similar concept would be welcomed by men to let them ejaculate only once a year… or would they see it for what it is – a ceding of control and natural functions?
I agree for some it would be a welcome switch, but what if it’s just another band-aid solution like most pharmaceutical options? For me, for a long time I had really painful periods, and for a long time my doctors just wanted me to go on the pill. I finally had exploratory surgery and found out I had endometriosis. I didn’t need to end my periods, I needed to get those damnable growths out of my retro-peritoneal cavity. Just a thought.
Despite being a male, I have been around women for long enough to understand, for some at least, the idea of being able to “switch off” periods would be regarded as welcome.
Of course research must continue and must be conducted honestly and the results published and reported so that if problems emerge, people can know about them. The danger is that “research” will be confined to the manufacturer’s labs and any bad results suppressed.
Presumably, a side effect of period suppression is that it is at the same time a contraceptive. If this is safer than the pill, that would be another reason for many accepting it.