Wednesday, May 30, 2007
the pill
My apologies for the hiatus. I feel I must get at least one new post in before it becomes June and therefore about three months since my last post (!!!)
There has been a great deal of publicity lately about the new birth control pill which does away with periods entirely. Slate published a good opinion piece on the story this past Saturday.
It’s pretty simple: the traditional birth control pill already did away with ovulating, but added in a week of placebo hormones so that bleeding still occurred. But the new pill goes without the placebo week and the period simply never happens.
Of course, everyone has an opinion on whether or not this is a good thing, no matter that it really should be up to each woman what she wishes to do about her own body. Simply creating and marketing the pill doesn’t mean all women will want to do away with their periods.
But the news got me thinking about the male birth control pill. Haven’t we heard some hype about a male pill? I dug up this piece on msn. I thought the most charming part of this piece was the suggestion that famous male athletes can use the pill to avoid impregnating the opportunistic groupies they sleep around with. On aother msn site, I found an article from the TODAY show including an unofficial poll that showed that 1 in 5 men said ‘no way’ to taking this pill and 38% of women said they wouldn’t trust men to take it anyway.
Let’s get this straight then, women use their ‘power of pregnancy’ for evil and the power should be traded to men but at the same time men don’t want to take the pill and women don’t believe they can be trusted to take it anyway. This makes no sense to me.
