Expert: New Birth Control That Eliminates Periods Is A Bad Idea
By Lori Wright, Media Relations
June 6, 2007
A new birth control pill that will eliminate a woman’s monthly menstrual
cycle is misguided because for the vast majority of women, it provides
a medical solution to a social problem, according to a UNH professor who
researches medical sociology and gender.
Jean Elson, professor of the sociology of gender and medical sociology,
is available to discuss the FDA’s approval of the drug Lybrel, which
will eliminate a woman’s monthly menstrual cycle.
“Menstrual manipulation appears to be another in a long line of
attempts to medicalize women’s natural biological life events. The
process goes something like this: Some women have problems with a natural
body function, like menstruation or menopause; a biochemical treatment
is devised; these problems are generalized to include all women who experience
that natural body function; and medical treatment is then marketed to all
women,” Elson says.
“The rationales for using extended-cycle birth control therapy to
suppress menstruation include ‘hygiene mess,’ embarrassment,
expense, interference with athletic performance and ‘traveling problems.’ I
am certainly an advocate for making women’s lives easier, but I question
whether it’s appropriate for women to ingest additional hormone medication
for what are really social, rather than medical, problems,” she says.
“Extended-cycle birth control therapy may have value for a small
number of women who experience extraordinary menstrual problems. For most
women, however, menstruation is a normal life event, not a medical condition,” Elson
says. “Employing hormones to curtail normal menstruation strikes
me as a very odd mix of feminism and medical authority – women are
offered the opportunity to control their own bodies, but what are the real
implications?”
“Our cultural beliefs and social arrangements make menstruation
more troublesome than it could be. Women would be spared embarrassment
if they weren’t taught that menstruation is dirty and shameful. They
might not find their periods so inconvenient if schools and workplaces
provided opportunities for people to rest. And rather than viewing monthly
menstruation as a disability, we might celebrate it as symbolic of women’s
emancipation from the continual pregnancies that disabled earlier generations,” she
says.
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