Going without monthly ‘curse’ just a pill away

Little girls can’t wait to grow up. We mess around with lipstick and makeup as soon as we’re big enough to root through Mommy’s purse.

Our birthday money goes to lip gloss and nail polish. Twenty different shades of pink, and we can tell you the official name of each and every one.

And then we are “a woman” and spend the rest of our lives trying to recapture fragments of our girlhood.

Some of these efforts can be expensive (face-lifts, a younger man) and others not terribly effective (more makeup).

But until recently, there was one aspect of femaleness that we were taught we could do nothing about, that irksome monthly matter at the very core of womanhood.

There are good reasons our mothers and grandmothers called this physical phenomenon “the curse.”

That monthly period was the price we paid for our double X chromosomes. Pregnancy and (sometimes) its corollary (breast feeding) were the only methods of putting a stop to the rhythms of nature every 28 days or so.

Now comes a whole new array of products to tinker with our hormonal makeup.

Take Seasonale, Barr Pharmaceutical’s heavily marketed and expensive (more than $650 a year) daily birth control pill that promises to cut down the customary monthly period to only four a year.

It’s just one of several different prescription drugs now or soon available to tamper with what we thought was our inevitable female plight.

The Food and Drug Administration is likely to soon OK another daily oral contraceptive, Wyeth’s Lybrel, that allows users to stop periods altogether while taking the pill.

Doctors don’t agree on whether these period-suppression drugs are a good thing or not. Women aren’t sure, either.

But at least there are choices where before there were none.

Now women get to decide for themselves if they’ll go with the flow.

The pill is the most popular form of birth control (30.6 percent), followed by tubal sterilization (27 percent), condom use (18 percent), vasectomy (9.2 percent) and injectible contraceptives (5.3 percent).

 Among users of the pill, the effectiveness rate is 92 percent, meaning eight out of 100 women taking it for a year will become pregnant.

Source: the MAYO clinic

Ellen Warren
Chicago Tribune

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