Slate's excellent column "Human Nature," by William Saletan, has a piece on the new drug approved to end monthly bleeding.
We've been tampering with periods for years. But on Tuesday, we made it official. The Food and Drug Administration approved Lybrel, the first birth-control pill explicitly designed to abolish monthly bleeding.
Since the dawn of hormonal contraception, women have debated the wisdom of suppressing their periods. Crunchy feminists think it's unnatural. Techno-feminists think it's liberating. I'm a guy, so I'll stay out of the fight over womanhood. But I'll say one thing about nature and liberation: Pharmacology is dissolving them. Menstruation as we know it isn't exactly natural. And for some women, abolishing it isn't exactly liberating.
Now I have a hard time imagining what is wrong with this therapy. But Saletan directs our attention to one crunchy feminist who warns woman that
The daily, nonstop use of the potent estrogen in the birth control pills designed to do away with menstrual periods results in a woman’s having LESS AVAILABLE NATURAL TESTOSTERONE in her body. The consequences of this state of testosterone deficiency can be subtle to severe. One thing that women taking pills to do away with their periods notice is that they have significantly less interest in making love, and experience less pleasure in sex.
Well, there is an issue that those of us with a stunted Y Chromosome can care about. Still, Dr. Susan Rako's piece reminds me of those guys who think they were abused by circumcision, and who go around with weights on their penees hoping to grow their foreskin back.
But Saletan makes a fascinating and unexpected point: that there is nothing natural about menstrual bleeding.
Primitive women seldom menstruated, since they were pregnant or breastfeeding. For them, menstrual suppression was natural. What we call natural, the monthly period, was largely a byproduct of early contraceptive methods, which blocked pregnancy but not ovulation.
Then, about 50 years ago, we invented the pill. It prevented ovulation by mimicking the hormones that told a woman's body she was already gestating a baby. In short, it faked pregnancy. But that didn't bother people. What bothered them was the idea of disrupting the monthly cycle, particularly "natural" menstruation every fourth week. So drug makers replicated the cycle. They sold pills in packs of 28, the last seven of which were dummy pills. The dummy pills allowed hormone levels to sink, causing the uterine lining to decay and bleed as though the woman were losing an egg. In fact, there was no egg. That was the whole point of the previous 21 pills. Fake pregnancy, fake period.
The point here, it seems to me, is that when we ask what is natural, we can't look to the past. Modern society and technology have changed the context beyond recognition. Instead we should ask what promotes human flourishing, given our best guess about how nature operates in this brave new world. I can't wait to see what Dakota Women make of this.
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