The future of the Pill
Mary Kenny
It is generally estimated that there are about three million women in Britain who are at present taking the contraceptive pill. Most of these will be under 35, since it is now medically accepted that the oral contraceptive is dangerous for women over that age-limit. Many of these women will be under 16 although no one knows exactly how many very young girls do take the pill, since polite fictions are sometimes connived at for the sake of the law and discretion. Just as young boys volunteering for war in the old days were not questioned too closely so, today, under-age girls presenting themselves for contraceptive facilities Are now rarely refused. The Family Planning Association, supported by the Department of Health and Social Security, takes the view that some contraceptive is better than no contraceptives, even for the very young, and the pill remains the most reliable contraceptive that exists. The problem with the pill, however, is that it is a steroid — a very powerful drug Which affects every cell in the human body. We have no idea of what the long-term effects of such potent and consistent medication may be. But there is a great deal of evidence, too, of what current effects can be, and the Royal College of General Practitioners' report of 1974 ascribed to the pill a long list of poSsible problems and dangers. These include vascular disease, blood clotting, metabolic dysfunction, visual disturbances, liver failure, headaches, high blood pressure, cancer, infertility, diabetes, depression, loss of libido. anaemia, vitamin-B deficiency, bladder Infections, water retention, hirsutism, thickening of the walls of the uterus, nausea and several other ailments and illnesses. Since then, the Americans have done further research on the pill, and according to an American book published here in 1978*, 7°r/ten and the Crisis M Sex Hormones , the list arnaladies caused by the pill is even :Women and the Crisis in Sex Hormones Barbara Seaman and Gideon Seaman (t-tarvester Press, £11.50) more awesome than the 1974 report indicated. This bulky study claims that birth defects are higher among mothers who have taken the pill; that arthritic illness can be caused by the pill; that backache, skin haemorrhages and cervical erosion is caused by the pill; and that because the pill alters the acid-alkaline balance in the vagina, it makes women more susceptible to venereal disease.
The pill, once welcomed as a wonderdrug. has now taken on some of the aspects of the all-time bete noire, and interestingly, some of the fiercest anti-pill propaganda is now coming from the feminists. The authors of Women and the Crisis in Sex Hormones castigate the pill as a male conspiracy. backed by the big business of the multinational drug companies, to keep women in the passive service of selfish men who care less for women's health than for their own convenience and pleasure. Among the most passionate critics of the pill in this country is Germaine Greer, who recently said that a major impediment to the sexual pleasure and fulfilment of women is the fact that we are all being drugged to our eyeballs. It certainly seems that even in post-pill or anti-pill therapy, the drug companies are still winning. A not infrequent result' of taking the pill is dysmenorrhoea and temporary infertility; coming off the pill, the menstrual cycle may not return to normal for 'some time and the woman may experience difficulty in conceiving. The treatment for this is another course of drugs to induce fertility — also supplied by the same Pharmaceutical companies which produce the pill in the first place. Dr Ellen Grant, a specialist in chemical research, who worked for the Family Planning Association in the late Sixties, says that the real problem with the pill was that originally it was designed to be given to women who had completed their families — women in their late thirties and forties, in which case the problem of infertility of second-generation effects would not apply. But when it was noticed that older women were the ones put at risk by the pill, the marketing policy was switched to the younger age group: 'And this is where we are really running into serious problems. We are playing around with the hormones of very young girls and we do not have any real idea where it is going to lead. I have already seen a lot of medical damage from it.' Where once Ellen Grant prescribed the pill herself, she has now come to see it as one of the major pollutants of our time. The drug companies, of course, maintain that the pill is constantly being developed and improved, and that the early contraceptive pills were crude by comparison to today's products — though no one said so during the Sixties, except. ironically, the Russians, who declared, as early as 1967, through the Soviet Health Minister, that it was too dangerous for Russian women. The pill today, say its defendants, is getting better all the time, and doctors are increasingly careful about monitoring patients for contra-indications; the suggestions made a few years ago that nurses or other paramedical workers should be able to issue repeat prescriptions, or that it should be available over the pharmacy counter, have now been discarded. And recently, there was an announcement by the German drug company. Sehering. that an entirely new and much safer pill will be on the market by the end of 1980 — and that it has already been passed by the British government's Committee on Safety in Medicines. This new pill (which has not yet been given a trade name) is to be based on a lower than ever dose of the synthetic hormones which are at present causing the negative sideeffects.
Can we believe ,it? There is an air of scepticism surrounding new wonder=drugs nowadays that was not apparent in the days of the great drugs boom of the Fifties and Sixties. Is there such a thing as a free lunch? Is there such a thing as a perfect solution to the delicate and complex mechanism of human reproduction?
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