The Pill At 50
Posted by Rebecca Teti in News on Tuesday, November 30, 2010 11:59 AM
You have to read this remarkable article on the pill at 50.
Not much in it will surprise you—except for the fact it made the cover of New York magazine.
The author doesn’t share the Church’s moral outlook, yet wants women to think hard about whether being on a drug that makes you fake pregnant for years at a time doesn’t have a downside.
for the wheatgrass-and-yoga generation, there’s something about taking a pill every day that’s insulting to one’s sense of self, as an accomplished, adult woman. “I feel like I’ve gotten a message over the years that the less I have to do with the nitty-gritty biological stuff of being a woman, the better, and that’s a weird message,” says Sophia, 35, who was on the Pill for fourteen years. “In my ninth-grade health class, I remember the teacher saying, ‘You can get pregnant any day of the month, so always use protection,’ and I kind of knew that wasn’t true, but because I was on the Pill, I never really cared about finding out the right answer. The Pill takes a certain knowledge away from you, and that knowledge is empowering.”
I had to smile as she chronicled the “cult market” in natural fertility awareness that has cropped up in secular circles. Apparently NFP is now hip so long as it’s called something different and we pretend the Church had nothing to do with developing the science involved!
The article’s also very hard on the Pill as essentially the cause of most infertility—and says our culture’s not very up front with women about what delaying childbirth a decade will do.
On the Pill, it’s easy to forget the truths about biology. Specifically, that as much as athleticism or taut cheekbones are, fertility is a gift of youth. The body that you wake up with after fifteen or more years on the Pill is, in significant ways, not the one you started out with. With age, body rhythms change. Cystic conditions, endometriosis, and a whole host of complicated ailments are more common. And whatever “irregularities” a woman may have experienced in her teenage years before going on the Pill will likely be around when she goes off it. “Some women who come off the Pill in their thirties are surprised that it takes a few cycles to get their periods back, or that they may have very long cycles, or cycles without ovulation,” says Jill Blakeway, founder of acupuncture center Yinova near Union Square and a co-author of the cult book Making Babies. “The Pill didn’t create these problems: In most cases, the problems were there all the time, but because they were on the Pill, these women were never motivated to deal with them. And now they have a time issue.”
But the biggest issue for aging women, of course, is that over time, their stockpile of eggs becomes depleted, and the ones they still have are not of top quality. Fifty percent of women over 35 will fail to get pregnant over the course of eight months, and after that the odds keep dropping.
In spite of the author’s downplaying the medical risks of the pill and having no problem with any of the behaviors surrounding “choice,” this is the most hopeful article I’ve seen on the subject—because the most honest, and the first time I’ve seen a serious secular challenge to the easy assumption that the Pill is the foundation of women’s freedom.
There’s an odd piece of trivia, too. Clomid, the fertility drug that encourages ovulation, was “originally synthesized from the urine of postmenopausal nuns.” I feel there is a joke about spiritual maternity in there somewhere.
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