Contraception: Why Not? (part 15)

This post is part of a series by Professor Janet E. Smith.

Slide: Dismissing Side Effects

When the Pill was first discovered in the later 1950’s it was tested on women in Puerto Rico.  And these are the reports that came back:

Dr. Edris Rice-Wray, a faculty member of the Puerto Rico Medical School and medical director of the Puerto Rico Family Planning Association, was in charge of the trials. After a year of tests, Dr. Rice-Wray reported good news to Pincus. The pill was 100% effective when taken properly. She also informed him that 17% of the women in the study complained of nausea, dizziness, headaches, stomach pain, and vomiting. So serious and sustained were the reactions that Rice-Wray told Pincus that a 10-milligram dose of Enovid caused “too many side reactions to be generally acceptable.”

Slide: Dismissing Side Effects

Rock and Pincus quickly dismissed Rice-Wray’s conclusions. Their patients in Boston had experienced far fewer negative reactions, and they believed many of the complaints were psychosomatic. The men also felt that problems such as bloating and nausea were minor compared to the contraceptive benefits of the drug. Although three women died while participating in the trials, no investigation was conducted to see if the Pill had caused the young womens’ deaths. Confident in the safety of the Pill, Pincus and Rock took no action to assess the root cause of the side effects.

I first heard about this situation in Puerto Rico years ago when I read a book by a woman named Dr. Ellen Grant.  The title of the book was, “The Bitter Pill.”  She was a physician in London in the 1950’s and she started prescribing the Pill to her patients.  She was dismayed when they returned with migraines, high blood pressure, ovarian cysts, and other maladies.  She was perplexed since she wanted to make her patients’ lives better, not worse.  This led her to review the early studies of the Pill.

She discovered that there was an attempt to find a contraceptive for males as well as for females.  As you will notice, there is no contraceptive pill for males.  There is a reason for that.  In the study group of males, one male had some slight shrinkage of his testicles.   Thus, all testing on the male contraceptive pill was stopped, since that is intolerable.  Among the female study group three women died.  They simply adjusted the dosage of the hormone.  What does that tell people? It may tell us that women are stupid.  Women do things to their bodies that men won’t do to theirs.

Slide: “Sexy” contraceptive patch fatality rate revealed

We read in this report of September, 2004 that 17 women between the ages of 17 and 30 had died since the release of the patch in 2002.  The contraceptive patch is placed on a woman’s abdomen so she can absorb into her body a chemical contraceptive.  The report tells us that, “These documents also revealed that 21 additional life-threatening conditions have been found, including heart attacks, blood clots, and strokes.”

If a 28-year-old woman dies of a stroke, they’re not going to put on the death certificate that she died because she was using a contraceptive.  One doctor doubted these reports so he looked at the medical records of these 17 women between the ages of 17 and 30 that died and found out that he thought only 6 of them could really be attributed to the patch, that we had enough evidence to say that these deaths were caused by the patch.  But he thought that was an acceptable side effect.  The convenience of the patch is so great that it is worth risking death for.  What other drug would get this pass from the pharmaceutical industry, from the FDA?  Tobacco is treated more harshly.

Doctors have told me that we’ve seen nothing yet in respect to lawsuits.  What the pharmaceutical companies will face in respect to contraceptives is going to be huge compared to what we had with the tobacco companies.  The pharmaceutical companies know every bit as much how bad contraceptives are for women as the tobacco companies knew about tobacco.  And some day there may be massive lawsuits.

Slide: An Insult to Women

I think contraception is an insult to women.  Instead of women saying fertility is a great gift, fertility is healthy, I’m not going to mess with my fertility, I’m not going to put massive doses of anything in my body to mess up my fertility, women basically apologize for their fertility.  “I’m sorry.  When I have sex, I may get pregnant.  Sure, I’ll be glad to mess with my body to correct this humiliating and inconvenient feature of my sex.”

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