While adolescents are not as sexually active as we are led to believe, older Americans are more active than you might think. From the Orlando (Fla.) Sentinel:
Across the nation, and especially in communities that attract a lot of older Americans, the free-love generation is continuing to enjoy an active — if not always healthy — sex life. Read more…
Recent research is pointing to the fact that the pill could increase a woman’s risk of heart attack and stroke long after discontinuation.
During the late 1960s when it came to light that the pill was causing blood clots leading to heart attack, stroke, pulmonary embolism, and death, Congress enacted laws requiring patient packet inserts for all drugs to ensure patients were informed about the risks that accompany medications. Ironically, each decade has revealed a new risk for the pill (like breast and cervical cancer), but in spite of the informed consent laws, many clinicians and most women are the last to know what is being published and debated in the medical literature. This decade is no different.
The U.S. is contributing to the spread of HIV/AIDS among African women by its reckless distribution of hormonal contraceptives of all kinds in so-called “reproductive health” programs.
The world’s deadliest killer, HIV/AIDS, and the Birth Control Pill have been carrying on a secret and deadly “love affair” for decades. While women swallowed their “freedom” with the morning orange juice, studies that should have made global headlines yellowed in medical journals, unknown to the general public. Only doctors learned about the pills deadly affair with HIV/AIDS, and they were too busy writing prescriptions for hormonal contraceptives to talk. Read more…
Contraceptives are polluting women’s bodies and the environment, but who cares?
There is a huge effort today to protect the physical environment from the unintended effects of human activity. We have international agreements and national policies to reduce global warming by curbing excess carbon, produced as human beings pursue their material wellbeing. Read more…
The contraceptive pill could make women better gossips but no better at reading maps, if research carried out in Austria is anything to go by.
The first ever study of the effect of the pill on women’s brains found that it increased areas linked with memory and conversation skills — parts of the brain already better developed in women than in men, the Daily Mail reports. However, the contraceptive appeared to have little effect on areas more dominant in men, including those associated with spatial skills such as map reading. Read more…
The New Contraceptive World Order holds these tenets: Sex is a sterile recreational activity. “Safe” sex (meaning sex with a condom) has no significant negative consequences. Marriage is not necessary for either sexual activity or childbearing. And unlimited sexual activity is an entitlement for everyone old enough to give meaningful consent.
But there is a serpent in this man-made paradise: All of these tenets are false. Read more…
My article on the New Contraceptive World Order is now up on the National Catholic Register website.
The 50th anniversary of the birth control pill — the Food and Drug Administration gave it final approval in 1960 — has been the occasion of much media fanfare, societal reflection — and what we might call Secular Triumphalism. We, the Enlightened, knew all along that giving women control over their fertility was going to be simply marvelous. End of story. Some of us have tried to point out that the pill had some negative consequences, but few seem interested….
The New Contraceptive World Order holds these tenets: Sex is a sterile recreational activity. “Safe” sex (meaning sex with a condom) has no significant negative consequences. Marriage is not necessary for either sexual activity or childbearing. And unlimited sexual activity is an entitlement for everyone old enough to give meaningful consent.But there is a serpent in this man-made paradise: All of these tenets are false.
Read it all here.
Wowsers. Well, I guess it’s about time it happened…or is happening. It will be interesting to see how this affects men and society. Though I wonder how many men would really be willing to use it.
by Carolyn Moynihan
Why has there never been a male contraceptive pill? Probably because, knowing that women have stronger reasons to carry this burden, nobody was trying very hard. But now, 50 years after women started risking their health and happiness by swallowing synthetic hormones on a regular basis, Israeli scientists have announced that a male pill is in sight. Read more…
by Carolyn Moynihan
Women are losers in the modern sexual relationships market. What will it take for them to break out of this dilemma?
Mother’s Day in the United States (and some other countries) had an ironic twist to it this year: the powers that be chose to observe May 9 as the fiftieth anniversary of the public debut of the contraceptive pill, the twentieth century’s chief weapon against motherhood as a serious vocation. Read more…
by R.J. Snell
The fiftieth anniversary of oral contraceptives is a reminder of all the things the Pill lets us forget.
The Pill turns 50 this month. Such a significant anniversary prompted cover stories, histories, celebratory remembrances, and calls for expanded access. None of this attention is surprising: the Pill was and continues to be an enormous source of social change in demographics, sexual activity, social mores, divorce, gender roles, and the economy. What is surprising is how mixed some of these assessments have been. Read more…
Here’s another good one to commemorate the anniversary of The Pill.
By Daniel J. Flynn
Fifty years ago this June, the Food and Drug Administration granted approval to the birth-control pill. Because the FDA had announced on May 9, 1960, that it intended to approve the drug, and because May 9 conveniently fell on Mother’s Day this year, The Pill’s celebrants seized on Mother’s Day to mark The Pill’s anniversary. In contrast to the perfect timing that links a drug to prevent motherhood with a holiday celebrating it is the bad timing that witnesses The Pill’s 50th anniversary coinciding with a study whose findings suggest birth-control pills have worked better in theory than in practice. Read more…
For those of you who are too young to remember: Racquel Welch was a serious sex symbol in the seventies. Anyhow, here is her take on the anniversary of The Pill. I have to love her for her graciousness to her ex-husband:
On the upside, by the early 60′s The Pill had made it easier for a woman to choose to delay having children until after she established herself in a career. Nonetheless, for young women of childbearing age (I was one of them) there was a need for some careful soul searching — and consideration about the long-range effects of oral contraceptives — before addressing this very personal decision. It was a decision I too would have to face when I discovered I was pregnant at age 19. Read more…
(CNN) — It was 50 years ago that the U.S. FDA approved the birth control pill, an anniversary the agency is celebrating this Sunday, which (coincidentally?) happens to be Mother’s Day. Here are a range of opinions CNN.com gathered on the significance of The Pill’s introduction, and the cultural ripples it set in motion.
Letty Cottin Pogrebin is a founding editor of Ms. Magazine, a founder of the National Women’s Political Caucus, and the author of nine books, most recently the novel, Three Daughters. Read more…
Janet Smith is the bomb.
Detroit, Mich., May 7, 2010 / 07:55 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Responding to a recent Agence France Presse (AFP) article that criticized Catholic teaching on contraception, well-known professor, Dr. Janet Smith, said that in her opinion, the poorly researched piece “was inaccurate and slanted from the beginning.” Read more…
by Stuart Koehl
May 9, the fiftieth anniversary of the birth control pill’s approval, is being celebrated in the mainstream media by both feminists and environmentalists enamored of zero population growth. The pill is often considered the root cause of the sexual revolution, with some opining that, but for the pill, much of the sexual anarchy of the last forty years might have been avoided. But is this true, or did the pill merely accelerate moral and sexual trends already present in society? Read more…
Great article made even better by the fact that it features our very own Dr. Jennifer Morse!
It has been hailed as one of the greatest public health breakthroughs of the 20th century. It enjoys overwhelming approval in public opinion polls. But the ripple effects of the pill – approved for general use 50 years ago this weekend by the U.S. government – are still a hot topic of debate. Read more…
As mentioned in previous posts, Time Magazine is spotlighting America’s 50 Years on the Pill through somewhat rose-colored glasses. Really? No negative effects? Even sliced bread can’t compete with that prognosis.
As part of Dr J’s series on 50 Years of the Pill, we’ve included a podcast of her interview on Issues, Etc., where she discussed the topic. Has the Pill accomplished what its defenders promised? What other effects has it had on the way we view sex, fatherhood, babies, careers, and families?
This podcast is also available on our podcast feed or through iTunes.
Next up in our series on the Pill: how exaggerating the effectiveness of contraception causes serious problems. Read the statistics I quote in this column. If you don’t believe the stats I quote, you can go directly to the Alan Guttmacher articles where I first got them. Bottom line: contraception is least effective among women who are poor, young and unmarried. Yet these are the very groups to whom contraception is the most heavily marketed.
Over 70% of poor, cohabiting teenagers using condoms, will be pregnant within a year. By contrast, the middle-aged, middle-class married woman has a 6% chance of pregnancy after a year of condom use. Read more…
Next in our series, Fifty Years on the Pill, this article on the ideology of contraception. I call that ideology, “condomism:”
The twentieth century witnessed so much blood-shed in the name of ideology, you might think people would be ready to give it a rest. But no, we have a new ideology whose adherents believe will usher in a new heaven on earth. If only everyone would finally get on board, if only its adherents had the right combination of money and power, if only its Neanderthal opponents would surrender their squeamish-ness, well this new ideology could solve the world’s problems: poverty, environmental degradation and human health. The name of this new ideology? I call it “condom-ism.”
Its adherents believe we could solve all these problems, if only we had enough condoms. I exaggerate, of course. They actually believe that human salvation will require all sorts of birth control including abortion, not just condoms.
This article originally appeared on www.mercatornet.com on November 24, 2006.
or read it all at the Ruth Institute Marriage Library.
Dr Janet Smith is well-known in Catholic circles as a critic of contraception. In this article, she lists some of the deceptions that have been part of the history of The Pill. Dr. Janet E. Smith holds the Father Michael J. McGivney Chair of Life Ethics at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, Mich.
some of the early research that was done circumvented laws against contraception by purporting to do research to help women with problems with infertility. Not only were some of the trials illegal, some of them involved giving women in psychiatric hospitals drugs without their knowledge or consent. Read more…
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