Sweetening the pill

A young woman dissolves the sugar coating on the contraceptive pill and exposes its harmful, anti-woman core. Carolyn Moynihan | 15 October 2013 Holly Grigg-Spall is a young woman who calls herself a feminist but who is deeply unpopular with some of the sisterhood right now. English, 30-ish, married to an American and living in California, she has written a book criticising the contraceptive pill. Actually, Sweetening the Pill: Or How We Got Hooked On Hormonal Birth Controlis more than critical; it is a sweeping polemic against the pill and every form of hormonal contraception. Since this wonder drug is celebrated by mainstream feminists (Nancy Pelosi, Cecile Richards, Sandra Fluke…) as the great liberator of women, you can see why the others are peeved with her. And yet, Ms Grigg-Spall (pictured, right) has so much in common with the pill’s diehard champions. Like Ms Fluke, she grew to adulthood thinking that taking this medicine daily was as natural as having toast for breakfast. Like Ms Pelosi and Ms Richards, she thinks contraception is a reproductive right. (No, she is not from what she calls “the religious Right”.) But, although once “hooked” on them, she has fallen out of love with synthetic hormones and wants everyone to know why. In her mid-20s, when she should have been feeling on top of the world, Holly Grigg-Spall was feeling depressed and empty, ho-hum about sex. And that was when she was not feeling anxious and paranoid or erupting into furious arguments with her boyfriend. “I felt I was losing my mind,” she says. She had been on the pill since she was 17, when her mother and family doctor told her it would solve the problem of heavy and painful periods as well as protect her against pregnancy. She did not yet have a boyfriend and would not become sexually active for another four years, but she accepted their view that it was the responsible thing to do. She knew nothing about how the pill worked – other than stopping babies arriving – and did not think to ask. Ten years later, in 2008, she was still largely ignorant about what was going on in her body. She had been dutifully swallowing the pill in various forms and was currently on Yasmin (or Yaz), at her own request, having been impressed by Bayer’s aggressive advertising campaign for this “lifestyle” drug that cleared up acne and prevented side effects such as the weight gain often associated with the pill. A conversation with a friend, however, made her suspect it was this drug that was causing her mood swings and ruining her life. She started to read health feminist literature and ask questions. Gradually overcoming her fear – no, terror -- of becoming pregnant, she abandoned the pill altogether and relied on non-hormonal methods of contraception. Reports of women on Yasmin experiencing and even dying from blood clots, Federal Drug Administration action against Bayer in 2009 and mounting lawsuits against the company for its failure to inform users properly about its risks provided the impetus to turn Grigg-Spall into a crusader. By then she had moved with her husband to the US where she launched a blog about her experience, attracting stories from other pill refugees. In May 2010 when the 50th anniversary of the pill’s launching was being celebrated by economists, health professionals, population controllers and feminists alike, she gained a sympathetic hearing from some of the mainstream media with a piece in the UK Independent, an interview on BBC radio and respectful mentions in the London Times and the Washington Post. She has guest blogged on the feminist sites Ms Magazine and (ahem) Bitch. With the publication of her book, however, that attention has changed to annoyance and disdain. “Sweetening the Pill offers an insultingly reductive account of what it means to be female,” fumes Slate writer Lyndsay Beyerstein in a review that goes to some lengths to rebut the author’s claims. Bitch has another lengthy critique of Grigg-Spall’s treatment of “the science” under the heading “…a Completely Frustrating New Book on Birth Control”. I found the book rather frustrating, too, but not for the same reasons. The review copy I received is repetitive and needs a lot more editing. In addition, the author’s quest for alternatives to the pill – both technical and philosophical – leads her into feminist fringe territory which is sometimes cringe-inducing. And she fails to see the logical consequences of some of her insights. Nevertheless, in her attempt at a comprehensive critique of the pill and allied contraceptives she gets some important things right. The contraceptive pill is designed to treat no illness, but it can make healthy women sick. In The Doctor’s Case Against the Pill (1969), trail-blazing health feminist Barbara Seamanquotes a James Balog of Merck Pharmceuticals: “The issue was whether any woman would take a pill every day to prevent the chance she might get pregnant. They believed no one’s going to do that, not when they’re not even sick, and they’re not even sick!” This is one of many telling quotations in Sweetening the Pill. Female fertility is not an illness. The monthly cycle indicates that the body is healthy and functioning as designed. At the age of 27 Grigg-Spall was stunned to realise that the pill did not “regulate” her periods – it replaced them with “fake” periods. And the synthetic hormones which stopped her ovulating affected her whole body – not only the endocrine system but also the immune and neurological systems. Here was an explanation for her regular urinary tract infections, sore and bleeding gums, low blood sugar, hair loss and muscle weakness – on top of her mood disorders and mental fog. And those are only the milder effects the pill can have. It doubles the risk of a blood clot. In the case of Yasmin/Yaz the risk is another 50 to 75 percent higher and is cited in heart attacks, strokes and gallbladder disease as well. The pill is also implicated in heart disease, breast and cervical cancer; women who start using hormonal contraception young are particularly vulnerable to these effects. Yet health authorities and agencies such as Planned Parenthood are going all out to get teenagers onto long acting hormonal methods (LARCs) including the injection, the implant and the hormone releasing IUD, since young women have shown themselves unreliable in taking the pill. The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy website has promoted long acting methods with the line, “We love our LARCs because they let us get lucky without leaving anything to chance.” Get lucky? The cynicism behind this is breathtaking. Defenders of contraceptive drugs dismiss the risk of blood clots, for example, as reasonable compared with those of pregnancy, and cite benign effects on a range of conditions from acne to endometriosis. But pregnancy and childbirth – and the natural menstrual cycle itself, Grigg-Spall strongly argues -- are protective of women’s health in a number of ways, and the fact that the pill happens to be useful in correcting some disorders hardly justifies drugging hundreds of millions of women around the world who do not have those conditions. The pill is misogynistic, arising from fear of female fertility Following other feminist critics of the pill, she sees its development as the work of a male dominated capitalist system which has long been impatient with the female body and psyche. This ignores the socialist-welfare contribution to pill “addiction” which is at least as influential. Moreover, the extremes of both systems spring from materialism and a proprietary attitude to nature. But you need not accept the details of Grigg-Spall’s analysis to agree with her general thesis. It is no accident that The Economist once named the pill one of the seven wonders of the modern world. It clearly suited twentieth century capitalism to have women in the workforce earning the wherewithal to boost consumption, rather than at home raising children – and to have socialists providing an added rationale. The fear, of course, was largely on account of poor and lowly women both at home and in the developing world who threatened peace and prosperity with their “excessive” childbearing – an attitude which still drives the global commitment to birth control. Grigg-Spall has perceptive commentary on population control and the risks its chief agents are willing to take with the health of the world’s poor – including the drive to get women onto the contraceptive injection even though there is evidence that it is facilitating the spread of HIV/AIDS. The WHO and Bill and Melinda Gates get a special mention here. None of this would have happened, however, unless women themselves had bought into contempt for their fertility. Feminists embraced the pill because it gave women “control” of their own bodies within a sexual relationship. Ironically, says Grigg-Spall, they have handed this control to a misogynistic medical fraternity who dole out pills like candy, withholding the full story about what it does to the body. In agreeing to this radical manipulation of female bodies for the sake of sex without consequences feminists end up endorsing the male mode of being as the ideal one. Women can now have sex “like a man”, though Grigg-Spall questions the male stereotype implied here. From this comes “sex positive feminism” with its liberal ideology and embrace of pornography, and radical gender politics dedicated to “smashing the binary” system of male and female. If being female is a disease, here is the ultimate answer. Grigg-Spall’s answer to this whole trend is for women to get to know their bodies, reclaim the natural menstrual cycle and insist on living and working according to its rhythms – something she believes will benefit both women and the marketplace. There’s a lot about this in her book, ranging over a wide field – from “Catholic” natural family planning to menstrual activists who track their cycles by the moon – and some of it is rather far-fetched (taking days of work during your period, doing different types of tasks at different times of the month…) but the basic idea of the marketplace adapting itself more to women is no more than many mainstream feminists are also advocating, and is sound. “We are addicted to the pill” Does she really mean that the pill is an addictive drug? The Slate critic thinks so – and that the idea is ridiculous. But there are ways in which it rings true. The pill – and even more, LARCs – are the fast-food version of contraception, advertised as “safe, easy, reliable”. Above all easy, because, you know, women… you can’t expect much of them… Take and forget. Get an implant and never think about birth control for another three to five years. This kind of sales talk, which minimises responsibility, also creates dependency, and, after Sandra Fluke and the Obamacare-contraceptive mandate debate, who can doubt that women are utterly dependent on contraception? Some 80 percent of women in the US born after 1945 have used the pill. The medical and pharmaceutical industries certainly act like drug pushers, says Grigg-Spall. “For every dollar spent on basic research, $19 goes to advertising and marketing,” she writes of Big Pharma. More and more the “hook” for the latest pill is about its lifestyle benefits: better hair, clearer skin, no weight gain – things no young woman can do without. The media, from women’s magazines to national television networks, do well out of this advertising, which helps to explain their uncritical attitude to the pill. Doctors also are susceptible to drug company pitches and incentives. Then, having done their damage to women’s health -- Grigg-Spall lays the blame for that fact that some 30 percent of women in the US have some type of vaginosis, or vaginal infection, at the door of the pill and its assault on body chemistry -- these sectors cash in on the remedies. One could add as another beneficiary of this chemical roulette the fertility industry, which has thrived on the infertility caused by delayed childbearing and the diseases contracted during a decade or two of sexual relationships supposedly “protected” by the pill. Then there’s the whole wide area of the commodification of female sexuality, whereby the inwardly de-sexed, hormonally neutered woman is “sold back” her femaleness piece by piece in the form of must-have products to make her outwardly “sexy” – an idea Grigg-Spall picks up from another feminist author. Body literacy and natural family planning Sweetening the Pill falls far short of the critique of contraceptive culture some of us would like to hear from a smart and angry young woman. The author does not see that the copper IUD, the condom and the rest of contraceptive paraphernalia – not to mention abortion – are also an insult to the body, if not to its chemistry then at least to its integrity in the sexual act. Breaking away from the medical establishment’s grip is hardly a liberation if you fall straight into the arms of condom and cap manufacturers. However, Holly Grigg-Spall’s great discovery – the ability to track her menstrual cycle through the fertility awareness method (FAM, or NFP to those who know it as natural family planning) – may yet lead her to new philosophical insights as well. She has already picked up on the way this method can improve the relationship between spouses or partners. For the moment she is anxious to dissociate herself from the philosophy of “the religious Right” and seems to think it is a shame that Catholics perfected the method before feminists tumbled to it. But, if her book did nothing else than encourage other young women to pursue body literacy and fertility awareness, it would have performed a signal service. Carolyn Moynihan is deputy editor of MercatorNet. Link to Amazon.

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The End of Women

Carolyn Moynihan | Friday, 30 March 2012

The legacy of the sexual revolution is more subversive than its champions admit.

The death of the American feminist poet Adrienne Rich (pictured) this week has brought many accolades on account of her literary gifts and contribution to the feminist movement over the past 50 years. In her transformation from conventionally married mother of three sons in the 1950s, to lesbian partner and apologist in the 1970s, she became not only the voice but a living example of the revolutionary character of second wave feminism.

The chief legacy of that movement has been brought into sharp focus in recent months by the battle royal between Catholic authorities (mainly) and the Obama administration over the latter’s mandate forcing employers to pay for birth control, including abortifacients and sterilisation.

Old-guard feminists -- including Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sibelius -- are nervous and casting the conflict as a “war on women”, an attempt to wind back the “reproductive rights” won in the 1960s and 1970s with the arrival of the contraceptive pill and the Supreme Court decision decriminalising abortion.

On the other hand, those who regard such methods of birth control as objectionable or morally wrong -- including those who hold that view as a matter of religious faith -- are outraged that the principle of freedom of conscience could be trashed for the sake of a symbolic enshrining of contraception in the pantheon of free health services.

Yes, the mandate is both an overblown tribute to the value of contraception in women’s lives -- in particular for their “health” -- and an act of intolerance towards those who do not value it at all. But at least we can be grateful that it has stirred up a debate that really needs to happen - a debate about whether the sexual revolution that contraception and abortion let loose on society has been a good thing or a bad thing.

As Mary Eberstadt wrote in her contribution to a forum on the issue in the Wall Street Journal last weekend, the legacy of the sexual revolution has yet to be “settled in the Western mind” -- despite claims that “women” (minus, at the very least, the 25,000+ who have signed a letter objecting to it) are solidly behind the HHS mandate, and the sexual revolution to boot.

In her recently published collection of essays, Adam and Eve after the Pill, Eberstadt covers all kinds of fallout from the “sex without consequences” culture that has grown up over the past four decades, including the growing chorus of unhappiness from women writing on such mournful themes as “The Case for Settling” and “The End of Men”, complaining about men who won’t grow up and lamenting the general state of relations between the sexes. If the sexual revolution was such a boon, how come women are not happier? She asks.

Hanna Rosin, who also contributed to the WSJ’s sexual revolution forum, has an answer to that. She says happiness doesn't matter. Rosin argues that young women (those in their 20s and early 30s) are generally better off than young men. “They are better educated and earn more money on average,” she points out. In other words, they don’t need men -- except for “temporary, intimate relationships that don’t derail a career.” She is working on a book called -- guess what? -- “The End of Men”, due out in September.

Rosin does make some frank admissions. She concedes that there is a rumble of complaint from young women about men who won’t commit; that this is because the post-pill market has made sex “very cheap” and turned men into “free agents” who sleep with as many women as possible; which in turn causes women “a lot of frustrating little dating battles” and “heartache”. But that is a small price to pay, Rosin argues, for a woman’s future success in a career.

(Funny how arguments in favour of post-pill sexual culture always seem to hang on college educated women with careers, who generally do find a mate, rather than working class women who increasingly “settle” for the insecurity of serial cohabitation, and bringing up children, much of the time, on their own. But that is another story.)

The odd thing about Rosin’s theory is that it really describes “the end of women” rather than the end of men. The great gift of the sexual revolution to women is not that it has taken them out of men’s power but that it has made them over as the new men. They can pursue their careers just like men. They can have sex without getting pregnant and having to get married, just like men. They can ignore the emotional consequences of uncommitted sex (“And how bad are heartaches, anyway?” asks Rosin) as men tend to do.

When the ache for a baby gets too strong, today’s macho woman can go get herself impregnated with donor sperm at a fertility clinic. And since there’s really no difference between men and women any more she could just settle down with a lesbian partner and save herself any further trouble from the officially male of the species.

The truth is that, if men have become redundant, so have women. One makes no sense without the other. What we have instead is humanoids who come in a range of genders and can make use of their sexual endowment (or someone else’s) in a variety of ways. They can generate or acquire children as the case may be; they can saddle the kids with two “moms” or two “dads” or with other combinations of “parents” if it suits them. What that means for the children simply doesn’t matter. Nothing that comes from the sexual revolution can really be bad for anyone. Get used to it.

Isn’t this the insane world we see taking shape before our eyes? There may have been a lot wrong with marriage and the status of women in the America of young Mrs Adrienne Conrad (Rich’s married name), but cutting sex adrift from babies and marriage was patently not the solution. It has made nonsense of the body and made men and women strangers to themselves.

To refuse to become an active party to such madness is a right no just society should deny to any member.

Carolyn Moynihan is deputy editor of MercatorNet.

Reposted from MercatorNet, March 30, 2012

Exposing Obama's Big Lie(s)

“This isn’t about Catholics or contraception”

by Sheila Liaugminas | 11 Mar 2012 | 

“This is about the government coercing religious institutions to violate their own beliefs.”

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So clarifies the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty in their feature‘The Truth Should Not Be A Secret’. It aims to debunk the top myths that quickly circulated out of spin control centers from the administration and their complicit media partners.
I’ve heard every one of them and have had to counter them with facts, time and again, so this post by Becket Fund helps center and ground the debate.
Take this one, for instance:

Myth #5: The federal mandate actually protects women’s health because it increases access to free birth control.

Truth: Access isn’t the issue. 9 out of 10 employer-based insurance plans already cover these services. There is no need for the government to force religious groups to provide these services against their religious convictions.

One could launch a whole debate just on component parts of that sentence in Myth #5.
And then a whopper:

Myth #6: In a recent poll, 98% of Catholic women said they already used artificial birth control anyhow. So what’s the big deal?

The ‘lie repeated often enough’ that is not only addressed succinctly here but nailed perfectly by Michael Cook here.
The government would just prefer that we focus on Catholics and their beliefs about birth control. Because that deflects attention from the far less winnable battle for the Obama administration over denying fundamental religious liberty in America for individuals and institutions.
But that’s what the controversial HHS mandate is about. Which is why so many religious leaders and scholars are speaking out.
Like Dr. Timothy George and Chuck Colson.

The Catholic bishops in America have responded quickly, decrying the Administration’s decision for what it is—an egregious, dangerous violation of religious liberty—and mobilizing a vast grassroots movement to persuade the Administration to reverse its decision.

We evangelicals must stand unequivocally with our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters. Because when the government violates the religious liberty of one group, it threatens the religious liberty of all.

And Rev. Dr. Matthew Harrison, President of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, who testified by a House Committee on the mandate.

While we are opposed in principle, not to all forms of birth control, but only abortion-causing drugs, we stand with our friends in the Catholic Church and all others, Christians and non-Christians, under the free exercise and conscience provisions of the U.S. Constitution.

“Religious people determine what violates their consciences, not the federal government. The conscience is a sacred thing. Our church exists because overzealous governments in northern Europe made decisions which trampled the religious convictions of our forebearers.

They’re facing off with an overzealous government in the US with either a short memory or deliberate defiance of fundamental founding principles or both. And, as President Harrison told me at the end of the week, opponents of this mandate are not going away. There’s too much at stake.

Retrieved March 11, 2012 from MercatorNet http://www.mercatornet.com/sheila_liaugminas/view/10431

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE          www.nationalreview.com           PRINT

The Pill Is Not Good for Women By Erika Bachiochi & Catherine R. Pakaluk February 21, 2012 4:00 A.M.

The recent Health and Human Services mandate and the ensuing debate appear to have pitted religious-liberty claims against women’s health. But because religious leaders (rightly) focused on the need for a religious exemption, it may appear to some observers that they are unable to articulate a reasoned and weighty response to the administration’s claim that contraceptives are essential to women’s health and well-being.

The Obama administration is wrong on this score as well, and the substantive case needs to be made: The contraceptive revolution has failed to be the unmitigated boon to women or to society that it was hyped up to be.

For the past 50 years, the Pill has demonstrably assisted women — especially college-educated, career-minded women — in the timing of pregnancies and the delay of marriage. But the Pill also ushered in an era of unprecedented (and, as things turned out, unwarranted) confidence that sex could be pursued without risk — most notably, outside of long-term committed relationships.

The Pill, together with abortion as backup, appeared to provide full insurance against pregnancy risks. But as economists well know, full insurance tends to induce greater risk-taking: As people perceive sex to be safer, they pursue more of it. This applies especially to people who would otherwise be most vulnerable to the risks of unwanted pregnancy: the young, the unmarried, and those unable to care for a child. While a tight causal argument is difficult to make, correlations alone do not augur in favor of the Pill:

The rapidly increasing sexual activity of the Pill era correlates with a staggering increase in non-marital births — less than 5 percent of births in 1960 were to unmarried mothers, compared with roughly 40 percent today. A counterintuitive result, perhaps, but a fairly human one nonetheless.

And this points to an unresolved difficulty with the contraceptive revolution, which was supposed to serve women above all: Women on the whole disproportionately bear the burden of the new sexual regime. They are expected to dose themselves with a Group 1 carcinogen for approximately two-thirds of their fertile years. They sustain greater emotional costs from casual sex. They are at greater risk of contracting STDs and disproportionately suffer from their long-term consequences, such as cervical cancer and fertility loss.And even after 50 years with the Pill, as many as half of all pregnancies are still unintended. Women, not men, must make the heart-wrenching choice between abortion, reckoned a tragic outcome even by its supporters, and bearing a child with little to no paternal support. After all, since children were negotiated out of the bargain by the availability of contraception and abortion, men have secured a strong rationale to simply ignore or reject pregnancies that result from uncommitted sexual relations. Nobel-laureate economist George Akerlof predicted nearly two decades ago that this would lead directly to the feminization of poverty, as it ruefully has.

These traumas take their toll. A stunning paper by leading labor economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers documented recently that women’s self-reported happiness has declined both overall, and relative to that of men, since the early 1970s. Where women used to report higher happiness than men, they now report less. Stevenson and Wolfers ask, “Did men garner a disproportionate share of the benefits of the women’s movement?” Good question indeed. One may well wonder if the bargain advocated by the feminist elites has made much sense in the end: Were gains for elite women purchased with the currency of a new sexual ethic that has damaged women more generally?

Contrary to a popular misconception, the alternative to the contraceptive revolution is not to roll back the clock on women’s advancement, and certainly not to promote a physically and emotionally taxing outcome in which women have as many children as biologically possible. Rather, the alternative to contraception is to respect biological asymmetry, heal the wound between the sexes, and expect more from men.
READ MORE

This is NOT about women's health; it is about preventing and killing babies

Dr Rebecca Peck's forthcoming February 2012 Linacre Quarterly article, "Significant Risks of Oral Contraceptives (OCPs): Why This Drug Should NOT Be Included In a Preventive Care Mandate" (co-authored by Charles Norris, and incuding 72 references) will be a powerful tool for us. Her open letter (below) is a very practical extension of her Linacre Quarterly article that you have her permission to use as you wish.

Dear Friends,

I just wanted you to see this thread of a discussion on some points related to the HHS mandate.

Although the religious liberty issue is universally compelling, another crucial point is that birth control is NOT preventative care (see below). The current administration wants this to be about the Catholic Bishops denying women their "women’s health". This is why I feel our recent research article is so timely and important right now (1). The pill is not a warm little fuzzy harmless object. It causes significant harm and the American people have been deceived for long enough. As a practicing physician, I see the fallout every day—young women with blood clots in their legs, strokes, early breast cancer, HPV, and cervical cancer. This is NOT about women's health; it is about preventing and killing babies. The present administration will try to pit US Bishops against women and try to portray the bishops as a bunch of old men that don't want women to have their "women's health" options, but this has no credibility.

Every day, I, my husband Benjamin, and other doctors like us do TRUE preventative care. We do pap smears looking for cervical cancer, perform breast exams looking for breast cancer, refer for mammograms, order colonoscopies looking for colon cancer, and give immunizations to prevent pneumonia and influenza. These time-tested measures are very different from prescribing a pill to prevent a CHILD. A child is not a disease. Pregnancy and fertility are not disease states; they are normal physiological processes of the human body.

The point also needs to be hammered home that we are not just talking about insurance mandated contraception—we are talking sterilizations, “morning-after” pills, and abortions. Christians and Catholics can come together on the abortion issue. Accordingly, the way the pill causes abortions needs to be explained in a coherent manner (2). Manufacturers of the current birth control pill formulations have reduced estrogen content in an attempt to reduce some of the risks cited above. But, reducing the estrogen increases the likelihood of ovulation. The pill’s "backup" mechanism then comes into play by preventing implantation of the several day old embryo into the uterine wall. Since life begins at conception, the layperson can understand that this necessarily means that the new life is aborted.

Finally, regarding the recent decision of Komen to reinstate support for PP, the hypocrisy of this must be exposed. Birth control and abortion—PP's 2 major lines of business—INCREASE the risk of breast cancer (3).

All people of integrity want women to have options regarding their family planning, but why are the only discussed options those that are contrary to the Catholic Church's teaching? Fertility awareness and modern methods of Natural Family Planning—over a dozen distinct methods—cause NO harms at all! All have wonderful benefits for women that empower them, strengthen their families, and work with their bodies in the natural way God created them.

Blessings,


Rebecca Peck, MD

PS It should also be pointed out that HAVING children and BREASTFEEDING—a woman using her body as it is designed—actually protect a woman's health. Pregnancy is not a disease; pregnancy PREVENTS disease.

(1) Peck, R; Norris, C. "Why OCPs Should Not Be Part of a Preventative Care Mandate: Significant Risks and Harms of OCPs", Linacre Quarterly, Feb 2012 (forthcoming)
(2) Stanford, J; Larrimore, W. "Postfertilization effects of OCPs"www.polycarp.org
(3) Kahlenborn, C. http://www.polycarp.org/overviewbreastcanceroralcontraceptives.htm andhttp://www.polycarp.org/overviewabortionbreastcancer.htm

Look Out, Nuns! Ideology Trumps Science and Logic at the Lancet - Again

As Hanley shows below, the British medical journal, the Lancet, has published another article that is so intent on its ideological agenda that it seems unaware of its internal contradictions and the sheer irresponsibility of its recommendations.  

Look Out, Nuns!

By Matthew Hanley

The highly prestigious medical journal the Lancet recently published an article encouraging some women to take steps to address the “hazards of their nulliparity” – that is to say, of their never having children, which is a risk factor for several cancers, particularly of the breast.   You might be thinking: we just went through the annual pink ribbon exercise in breast cancer awareness, yet we never heard about the hazards of never having children. Or beginning to have them later in life. Or that bearing several children, beginning at an early age, and breastfeeding them all is quite protective against breast and other cancers.  I suppose it’s not a recommendation that sells, either literally (at the cash register) or figuratively (as is evident by astoundingly low fertility rates).  So has the Lancet finally repudiated its descent into the kind of politically correct obfuscation that would have once been recognized as an unconscionable abdication of the very scientific integrity from which medical journals derive their credibility?   Unfortunately they have done nothing that constructive.   The upshot of their article is that nuns, who “pay a terrible price for their chastity,” should get on the birth control pill; all distinction between chastity and nulliparity (the subject they are examining) escapes the two Australian authors’ attention. A woman with eight children, for example, can lead a perfectly chaste life.   The pill seems a curious remedy to propose, even if it can lower the risk of some relatively rare cancers, since it causes other and more common cancers, and has a litany of other serious side effects.   Supposing for a moment that all nuns began taking the pill religiously and a modest number of ovarian and uterine cancers – already quite rare among nuns – were averted as a result, we would also see a considerable increase in cancers of the breast, liver and cervix.  The pill would also double a nun’s risk of stroke – and increase her likelihood of blood clots and heart attack. It could also adversely affect her mood, her weight, her blood pressure, and so forth. The authors base their argument upon the dubious claim that the pill lowers the overall mortality rate, citing a study that has been convincingly refuted by a veteran authority on the matter.  Their own data also show that nuns, prior to age 70, actually have a lower risk of ovarian and uterine cancers, though after age 80, nuns do have higher mortality rate from these cancers. Breast cancer is generally more prevalent among nuns, but the authors brazenly claim that the pill does not increase the risk of breast cancer.   There is compelling evidence that the pill is linked with the sharp increase in breast cancer in recent decades, and the reasons why the pill, as well as induced (though not spontaneous) abortion increase breast cancer risk are not beyond the reach of the layperson to understand. The authors make haste to remind us that the Catholic moral tradition allows an action (i.e. artificial contraception) to be taken in some circumstances for therapeutic reasons when it would not otherwise be permissible. But they are on very shaky ground in pressing for indiscriminate contraceptive use for preventiverather than selectively therapeutic purposes – not because they appeal to Catholic moral reasoning, but because the medical evidence, of which they are custodians, indicates this would not be very wise.  But no matter:  headlines around the world conveyed the impression that contraceptives are on balance a lifesaver – a multi-purpose health booster. Proselytizing comes first, and there will be more rejoicing at the Lancet over the one who comes to believe in the wisdom of contraception than the ninety-nine who already so fervently believe.  The Lancet may have also left some with the impression that it is nobly riding to the defense of selfless women who might be laboring in the Lord’s vineyard, but nonetheless remain, unlike the liberated masses, oppressed by the very Church they naïvely serve.   No stranger to promoting bad science in the service of a predetermined ideology, the Lancet in 2004 published a seriously contorted meta-analysis conducted by Oxford scientists intent on denying the link between induced abortion and breast cancer. This has allowed everyone – from governmental health bodies (such as the National Cancer Institute) to breast cancer advocacy groups – to cite that Lancet study and safely hide behind a false veneer of scientific credibility. A new study conducted in Armenia by an international team of researchers (including members from the University of Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins) published in October found that abortion basically triples (2.86) the risk of developing breast cancer. It also found that each year of delay in giving birth increased risk of breast cancer, and any birth to be protective. These findings are generally consistent with the preponderance of evidence going back decades, which the Lancet, through its 2004 “study,” still gets away with denying.   One wonders if the authors of the Armenian study, sitting on eye-popping findings of such great public health import, wished to have them published in theLancet or another big name medical journal, but concluded that a submission with such unwanted findings, though worthy of global headlines, would simply be rejected. We should be grateful that they saw the light of day at all.   Coming from a journal bent on keeping everyone in the dark about the link between breast cancer and elective abortion – chosen by more than a million women a year in the United States alone – professing the desire merely “to give nuns’ plight the recognition it deserves” seems a touch disingenuous.  Were they actually faced with the prospect of social or legal rebuke, such disregard for the truth would take real chutzpah. Matthew Hanley is, with Jokin de Irala, M.D., the author of Affirming Love, Avoiding AIDS: What Africa Can Teach the West, which recently won a best-book award from the Catholic Press Association. His latest report, The Catholic Church & The Global AIDS Crisis is now available from the Catholic Truth Society, publisher to the Holy See in the U.K. © 2012 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to:info@frinstitute.org The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own. Retrieved January 12, 2012 from http://ht.ly/1gFH3p

Obama's attack on conscience

Carolyn Moynihan | Friday, 11 November 2011
Contraceptives mandate would make cowards of us all

A White House edict tells us to ignore our conscience when we go to work. Bernie Madoff should ask for a retrial.

If there is one thing that disaffection with “Wall Street” has achieved it is the ramping up of moral discourse. Not since the Great Depression, probably, have we heard so much about greed, corruption and injustice. But if you want people to be temperate, honest and just, they have to have two things: firm principles and a functioning conscience. How surprising, then, that the New York Times thinks we need neither.

In an editorial last weekend the Times argued that private insurers and employers who object to contraception as a matter of moral principle should be forced to provide coverage for it in their employees health insurance plans. Their conscientious objection to a White House edict mandating such coverage should be dismissed; it simply doesn’t rate on an ethical scale with birth control at the top and sexual morality at the bottom.

The Obama “contraceptives mandate” is due to take effect next year. All new plans will have to provide full cover for all FDA-approved birth control, surgical sterilisation and counselling for such services. A number of states have similar mandates but, according to Catholic authorities, the federal move is more radical than any of them.

An exemption for “religious employers” is so narrow it is laughable. It is available only for those that have teaching religious values as their purpose and primarily employ and serve people who share their religious tenets. The Catholic bishops have pointed out that, under this definition, “even the ministry of Jesus and the early Christian Church would not qualify as ‘religious’ because they did not confine their ministry to co-religionists or engage only in a preaching ministry.” The Good Samaritan would not be exempt. The federal move is “an unprecedented attack on religious liberty” say the bishops.

Last week representatives of Catholic institutions testified before a House subcommittee about the disproportionate impact which the contraceptives mandate would have on them. They would be forced, said the CEO of the Alliance of Catholic Healthcare, which represents 54 hospitals and 40 other care facilities in California, to choose between violating their consciences or no longer providing or paying for healthcare and other services -- leading to reduced care, especially for some of the weakest in society.

Too bad, says the Times, in effect. Perhaps the paper thinks the Church is bluffing about closing down services, although conflict with same-sex adoption laws saw the Boston Archdiocese give up its adoption work in 2006 and the same may happen in Illinois. Perhaps the editorialiser doesn’t care. Clearly, they think the moral predicament of millions of Catholics responsible for, working in or even using these services a matter of no importance compared to “access” to birth control. Their consciences are offended? Tough, says the Times. Let them hang their moral scruples on the coat-stand before they reach the office -- just as Bernie Madoff and Rupert Murdoch did when they went to work in the morning.

Is that a fair comparison? After all, Madoff and Murdoch offended against widely accepted ethical norms: thou shalt not deceive and defraud investors; thou shalt not condone, let alone encourage, invasions of privacy. And the harm they wrought was very real.

But the Catholic Church and its ban on contraception? Why, most of its own members appear not to understand it, let alone take it as a practical guide. Someone representing Catholics for Choice claimed at the hearings last week that “98 per cent of sexually active Catholic women had used a form of contraception banned by the Vatican”, as the Times editorial solemnly noted. The fact that Catholics for Choice is a stooge for the Ford Foundation, Planned Parenthood and other population control freaks makes the statistic rather suspect, of course, but widespread dissent from, or at least ignorance of the church’s teaching is an undeniable fact.

And yet, that does not make the Catholic authorities’ case against the Obama mandate one whit less valid. The bishops remain bound in conscience to uphold the Church’s teaching, make sure Catholics know it, and see that it is given practical effect in every enterprise under their jurisdiction. And all Catholics are bound by the teaching too, even if 100 per cent of them don’t acknowledge it.

As a matter of fact, many do accept the teaching and live by it. Up until now it has been respected as an ethical norm -- of long standing -- of a significant community within American society. What has also been respected up until now is that not only Catholics but all Americans ought to be free to follow their conscience in such matters. Women who want contraception coverage in their plans can choose the appropriate employer; those who run the institutions ought to be able to offer plan consistent with their moral principles.

Now, those affected by the contraceptives mandate face coercion -- basically, a choice between their conscience and their job. It does not matter that the number of those who actually experience this dilemma may be relatively few; it is the principle that is dangerous, the idea that one’s conscience can be parked in the lobby when we leave our homes and churches to participate in public life. That you can ignore it and no harm will come.

The Obama administration and the New York Times, along with the Ford Foundation, Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union, may think the landmark 1968 encyclical on birth control, Humanae Vitae, is poppycock, but they cannot afford to think that conscience is poppycock. If they do, on what grounds could they disapprove of Madoff, or Murdoch or any fraudster or hacker -- any kind of criminal at all?

The whole justice system, the whole of society, rests on the assumption that people can know right from wrong and choose between them. To relativise conscience in the way that the Times does is to take a very dangerous path. The world’s current financial troubles and scandals have made it very clear that we need to take more notice of conscience, not less; that consciences need to be formed by consistent moral principles and kept alert to their demands.

If that is not the case, what on earth is Bernie Madoff doing in prison?

Carolyn Moynihan is deputy editor of MercatorNet.

Retrieved November 11, 2011 from http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/contraceptives_mandate_would_make_cowards_of_us_all