Contraception: Why Not? (part 21)

Posted on October 8, 2009 by Dustmite
This entry is part 25 of 28 in the series Contraception: Why Not?

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

Slide: Effectiveness of Natural Family Planning

Natural family planning is every bit as effective as any form of contraception.  Dr. R. E. J. Ryder published an article in the British Medical Journal in 1993 in which he reviewed studies done by world health organizations on natural family planning and concluded that pregnancy rates of couples using NFP have depended on the motivation of couples.  He concluded:

Increasingly studies show that rates equivalent to those with other contraceptive methods are readily achieved in the developed and developing world.  Indeed a study of 19,843 poor women in India had a pregnancy rate approaching zero.  Natural planning family is cheap, efficient, without side effects and may be particularly acceptable to and efficacious among of people in areas of poverty.

Of the women studied, one third were Christian, one third were Muslim, and one third were Hindu.  Most of them were illiterate.  Do you know who was teaching them?  Mother Teresa’s nuns.  Mother Teresa had all of her nuns learn how to teach natural family planning.

NFP costs nothing and is perfectly healthy.  A fraction of the money, a fraction of the billions of dollars recommended by the UN for contraceptives could be used to teach women NFP and there would be billions left for health care, antibiotics, hygiene, making the water supply safe, etc.

Slide: Benefits of NFP

One benefit of natural family planning is that there are no bad physical side effects.  One of the reasons that NFP marriages last longer is that women using NFP are not as irritable, prone to depression and gaining weight and to having a reduced sex life as are women on contraceptives.  The non contracepting woman is a healthier woman; she feels better.  She is not taking drugs that mess with her system.

Secondly, using NFP requires mutual sacrifice.  That is key.  It takes two people to have sex.  It takes two people to abstain.  Not one or the other of the couple is bearing the contraceptive burden.  In couples where natural family planning is used, wives generally think their husbands are exceptional men.  She thinks, “I married myself an exceptional man.  He doesn’t ask me or expect me to take all of these drugs into my body that are bad for me.  He enjoys my company even when I’m not sexually available.  He can control his sexual desires.  He’s probably not masturbating and using pornography.  I’ve got myself an exceptionally fine man.”

And when a man is married to a woman who thinks he’s exceptionally fine, he tends to think he’s exceptionally fine.  It does good things for his self-esteem.  We women can be very critical.  When a wife thinks her husband is an incredibly wonderful man, that makes for an incredibly wonderful relationship.  He respects his wife; she respects him.

NFP enhances communication between spouses and strengthens marriages.   For some time I wondered how NFP enhances communication.  I figured it out one day and some people now accuse me of hiding in their closets and listening to their conversations.  I understand that about once a month, somewhere during that 7 to 10 day period of abstaining, a couple want to have sex, especially since she’s fertile and males and females are more attracted to each other when the female is fertile.  So they have a conversation that usually begins with the question: “Why did we decide it wasn’t a good idea to have a child right now?”  That’s a very important question because if the answer is that having a baby would be acceptable, the couple can go ahead and do what they want to do.

Now if a couple has a good reason for not having a baby right now,  that can go a long way to dampening the sexual desire.  Spouses have some pretty revealing conversations about the reasons.  The wife might say, “If we have another child right now, I’ll kill you.”  That could lead her husband to remember that there is a sporting event on TV that he very much wants to watch.

Or she might say, “You said that you would do the dishes.  You said that you would give the kids baths.  You said that I would have time for shopping on Saturday.  When was the last time that you did the dishes or gave the kids a bath or gave me any time on Saturdays?”  And he may respond, “I forgot; I’m so sorry.  I didn’t know.  All right, I’m on duty.”  Or she might say, “I have been tired with three kids under 5 but the baby is out of diapers now.  If we had another one I could handle it.”

Or the husband might say to the wife, “The reason we’re not having more babies right now is because I just can’t imagine how I’m going to support the kids that I’ve already got. I am worried about paying for braces, tuition, and having to buy a bigger van. The way you spend money!!  Your friend Jane wants a fence, you need a fence.  Your friend Jane gets a new kitchen, you need a new kitchen.  What’s a man supposed to do?  And she might reply, “I really had no idea that you felt that way.  I don’t need that kitchen.  I don’t need a fence.”  Or he might say, “I was worried about finances, but I have been getting raises along the way.  My dad raised 4 or 5 children on next to nothing.  If he could do it, I can do it.  So, yes we can go ahead.  If there’s another baby around here, we can handle it.”

That conversation takes place about once a month for couples who are using natural family planning.  It makes them assess where they are in respect to these key questions: Why are we having children and why are we not having children?  Who’s carrying their weight around here?  Who is not?  That’s the kind of conversation that marriage counselors want every couple to have, touching base with each other.  Natural family planning couples have that conversation.

Most people who use natural family planning have contracepted at one time.  They know the difference between a contracepted relationship and an NFP one.   Nearly all of them testify that their NFP relationship is definitely better than their contraceptive relationship was. When they were contracepting they rarely had conversations about having or not having babies.  They decided they were not having a baby for another 3 or 4 or 5 years.  They just get all involved in their own world and don’t talk about the mutual world they should inhabit.

NFP strengthens a couple’s relationship with God.  Catholics who come to accept the Church’s teaching on contraception generally have a whole new respect for their church.  It’s an incredible Church that has this teaching.  The Church clearly isn’t trying to win a popularity contest.  It teaches against contraception because this is God’s truth, not man’s truth.  These are God’s laws, not man’s laws.  Some of God’s laws are very peculiar to us.  But when we live by them, when we love our enemies, for instance, we’re usually a lot better off than when we hate them.  And it’s counterintuitive to think you ought to love your enemies.   But if we live by that then we’ve got a better world. We thought contraception was going to be great, but maybe it’s not.  My view is that if people stop using contraception, we will reduce the problems in society.  Poverty will go down.  Crime will go down.  People will generally be happier and better off.

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Contraception: Why Not? (part 20)

Posted on October 7, 2009 by Dustmite
This entry is part 24 of 28 in the series Contraception: Why Not?

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

Slide: Responsible Parenthood

The Church doesn’t teach that you have to have as many children as your body can bear.  This picture is of the little old woman who lived in a shoe; she had so many children she didn’t know what to do. The Church teaches that spouses should practice what is called responsible parenting.  God wants parents to enjoy their children.  Those who have children often find themselves really fatigued.  That’s normal.  It’s just that it should not be the dominant feeling in your life.  You want the dominant feeling to be gratitude.  Grateful for your spouse and grateful for your children.  If you’re starting to feel dragged down by it all, it’s probably time to push the pause button and get a little bit of rest.  Get the diapers under control.  And you probably will be soon wanting at some point to have another one when you’re feeling less overwhelmed.

Slide: Natural Family Planning

The Church approves of what is called Natural Family Planning or NFP.  NFP is not the old rhythm method.  It has nothing to do with counting days.  I’m going to be explaining NFP by reference to days and numbers, but that’s irrelevant really to what I’m saying here; any woman can use NFP no matter how irregular her cycles.

A woman is a relatively infertile creature.  For a long time it has been said that a woman is born with all of the eggs that she is ever going to have.  Now some researchers are saying women may produce more during their lifetime, but, whatever is the case, women have only a couple hundred thousand eggs, maybe at the most a million or so.  Males, on the other hand, are unbelievably fertile: any male has four to five, six to seven million sperm in any ejaculation.  So, comparatively speaking, women are incredibly infertile.

Women ripen and release only one egg a month.  That egg lives in a woman’s body for only 24 hours.  It can be fertilized for only 12 of those 24 hours.  So there is only a 12-hour window every month when a woman can get pregnant.  It’s more complicated than that, of course.  At the beginning of a month a woman has a few days of bleeding.   That’s because she didn’t conceive the month before.  During the last cycle she built up an endometrium which was prepared to receive a new little fertilized ovum, a new little human being.  If there’s no little human being, she sheds the endometrium.  Then a woman has what are called dry days that can last for several days.  There is no bleeding and there is no fertile mucus.  Her body is resting from having bled for a couple days.  She’s got to restore herself.  At the same time her body is preparing for the next cycle of ovulation.  She is starting to produce hormones that are going to cause her ovaries to ripen and release an egg and send it down the fallopian tube.  As those hormones are preparing that egg for ripening and releasing, the woman is starting to produce a certain kind of fertile mucus that she can recognize in her system.  It is present throughout the whole fertile phase.  It disappears about two or three days after she’s ovulated.

If that fertile mucus appears on a Monday, but a woman doesn’t ovulate until Friday, she can get pregnant from any act of sexual intercourse she had between Monday and Friday because the fertile mucus helps preserve the sperm and carries it to meet the egg.  If she has sexual intercourse on Monday, but not Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday and ovulates on Friday, she could get pregnant from the act of sexual intercourse that she had on Monday although it is only about a three percent chance.  On the day that she ovulates she has about a 43-47 percent chance of getting pregnant.  Twenty-four hours later the egg dies if it is not fertilized.  The woman cannot get pregnant for the rest of the month.  It’s absolutely impossible.  It’s only during the fertile part of the month that a woman can get pregnant.  She cannot possibly get pregnant during the first third of the month since there is no egg available.  She cannot possibly get pregnant for the final third of the month because there’s no egg available.  The egg has come and the egg has gone.  At about the same time the fertile mucus dries up.  So a woman knows that she has ovulated and she’s not going to ovulate again.  Her temperature also goes up a bit and stays up for the rest of the month.  So when a woman sees her temperature rise for a couple days in a row, she knows that she has ovulated, the egg has come and the egg has gone and she cannot get pregnant for the rest of the month.  There’s also a change in her cervix that alerts her that she has entered the fertile days and exited the fertile days.

Ninety three percent of women can learn how to read their bodily signs with one month of observation.  Ninety-three percent of women figure out right away when the fertile mucus is present.  The other seven percent, however, have some trouble reading their signs of fertility.  Some of these women have a problem because they are infertile.  If a woman is infertile the signs of fertility are not going to show up.  She is not going to have the mucus because she is not producing the hormones to help her ovulate.  A very good way for a woman to determine whether she’s fertile or infertile is to use natural family planning.  There may be other reasons for unreliable signs besides infertility. A woman, for instance, might be taking medication that dries up the mucus.  She might have allergies that cause her to produce mucus during the infertile days.  But almost every woman within 3 to 4 months of observing bodily signs can determine when she’s fertile and when she’s infertile.

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Life without computers

Posted on October 6, 2009 by Dustmite

Ever wonder what life would be like without your computer?  Maybe you’ve been thinking you spend way too much time on the computer and you should cut back a bit.  Well you’re not the only one.  Matter of fact, I found someone who is willing to do something about it.  Meet Jennifer over at CONVERSION DIARY.  You can read about her decision to give up her computer for an entire week by reading her post “A week without noise“.

Personally I don’t think I could do it.  I have come close but over all I still think life “flows through” the computer so I would be afraid of dying if I didn’t have my computer.

When her week of no usage is over, I would like to know from Jennifer if her cell phone usage “fluctuated” during this week? :)

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Contraception: Why Not? (part 19)

Posted on October 3, 2009 by Dustmite
This entry is part 23 of 28 in the series Contraception: Why Not?

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

Slide: Impediment to Total Self-Giving

John Paul II maintained that contraception is an impediment to total self-giving.  He maintained that it is a contradiction to say “I love you” and then to have contraceptive sex.  He said the act of sexual intercourse is meant to be an act of complete self-giving; it means, “I give myself to you in a way in which I give myself to no other.”  How many in our culture can say that?  It also means “I find you immensely attractive.  I want to give you great pleasure and I want to receive pleasure.” And it means “I’m open to having children with you.”  Contraceptive sex means, “I want to have great physical pleasure with you.”  It’s a minimal statement.

Non-contraceptive sex, on the other hand, is a maximal statement.  Males seem to understand this even better than females.  Contraceptive sex is, as they say, supposedly safe sex.  Not just safe from pregnancy but safe from commitment since pregnancy means commitment.  If there is no openness to a pregnancy, there is no commitment.  In fact, most men find the prospect of non-contraceptive sex scary.  And why is it scary?  Because it means a lifetime commitment.  If you have a baby with someone else, you have a lifetime commitment with that person.  And a man who is willing to engage in an act of non-contraceptive sex with a woman, who has any idea of what he’s doing, any sense of responsibility, is saying to this woman I am willing to make a lifetime commitment to you.  That’s what it’s all about.  If we have a baby and we’re going to be with each other forever, that’s fine with me.  In fact, that’s what I want.  And that’s what a non-contraceptive act of sexual intercourse means.  A contraceptive act of sexual intercourse you can have with just about anybody.  It has nothing written into it of lifetime commitment.

Slide: Babies are bonding

Babies are bonding.  It takes 23 male chromosomes and 23 female chromosomes to have a baby.  Two really do become one in a very physical and profound incarnational way.  Not only one physically, but much more than that, since they have brought into existence a new human being who has an immortal soul.  You have an immortal connection with someone with whom you’ve had a baby.

Slide: God creates every human soul

Conception is an astonishing thing for it involves a creative act by God.  A sperm does not have an immortal soul.  And an egg does not have an immortal soul.  But human beings do.  So where did we get that immortal soul?  We didn’t get it from the sperm.  We didn’t get it from the egg.  Only God can create a human soul.  And when God creates a new human soul He does what He did at the beginning of the universe.  He brings into existence something that did not exist before.  He makes something out of nothing.

There is no storeroom of preexisting souls.  It is very important to realize that God created your soul and the soul of every other human being individually.  He willed you into existence.  And He wants you to exist for eternity.  He entrusts babies to spouses.  He is saying:  “This soul belongs to me. I want this immortal soul to be part of the loving community that I am setting up for an eternity.  And I’m giving this baby to you to do the best that you can to raise up to be a citizen of the heavenly kingdom. Certainly this person has free will and I don’t expect you to make any guarantees.  But I want you to do the best that you can to return this baby to me.”

When spouses are engaging in an act of sexual intercourse during the fertile time of the month, they are sending an invitation to God to create a new human soul.  When sperm meets egg, He answers that invitation.  He answers that invitation if it’s made through rape or if it’s made through in vitro fertilization.  He honors the rules that He has set up.  He doesn’t want babies conceived through rape.  He doesn’t want them conceived through in vitro fertilization.  But when sperm meets egg, he says, “I’ve set up these laws; I’m going to respect them.  But what I want is human beings to be responsible.  They should be sending me an invitation only when they are prepared to accept the gift of a child.”

Slide: Contraception thwarts God’s life-giving power

Contraception puts up a barrier not just between the sperm and the egg, but between the sperm and the egg and God.  Contraceptive sex says we want to have sex on our terms.  We’re not going to allow God to engage in His creative act.

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Contraception: Why Not? (part 18)

Posted on October 2, 2009 by Dustmite
This entry is part 22 of 28 in the series Contraception: Why Not?

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

Slide: The Magic of Sexual Attraction

There is some really good news for the ladies.   Here we have an article that reports:

They say female chemical messengers, known as pheromones, may help dupe men into thinking plain women are more attractive and beautiful women are less attractive than they actually are.  Pheromones, the colorless, odorless chemical signals given off by the body, are thought to affect behavior in both animals and humans at a subconscious level.

This study involved showing men pictures of super models and having them rate the women for their attractiveness.  Of course, they found them to be very attractive.  Then they took something soaked in female fertile hormones and put that in the same room with the men.  We exchange hormones through the sense of smell, although they have no discernable odor.  Next the men viewed pictures of average women and under the influence of the fertile hormones, found the average women more attractive than the super models.  Women don’t seem to realize that they are naturally attractive to males and that using contraception works against, not for, that attractiveness.

Let us recall that whereas contracepting couples divorce at the rate of about 50%, couples using natural family planning almost never divorce.  It seems men are living in households with women who are going through fertile cycles are less likely to stray.  In fact, the men I know to be in marriages that use natural family planning are what I want to call very married.  They do not look around.  They are not interested in anyone else.  They are very satisfied in their marriage.

After one of my talks, a woman came up to me and said that when she converted to Catholicism she stopped contracepting and started using NFP.  She mentioned that many of her friends who were still contracepting complained that their husbands were having a problem with masturbation and pornography.  She said none of her friends who use natural family planning complained of that problem.  I think there is a reason.  Again, I think the men living with women having fertile cycles are having satisfying natural sex.  Men having sex with women who are contracepting seem to be turbulent and confused.

Slide: Pollution changes sex of fish

We have so much estrogen in our water supply it is unbelievable.  Here we read of a  study that reports:

A third of male fish in British rivers are in the process of changing sex due to pollution in human sewage.  Researcher by the environment [JES1] agency suggests they surveyed 1,500 fish in 50 river sites and found more than a third of males displayed female characteristics.  Hormones in the sewage, including those produced by the female contraceptive pill, are thought to be the main cause.  The agency says the problem could damage fish population by reducing their ability to reproduce.

There is a massive amount of estrogen in our water supply, both from contraceptives and also from plastics that shed various estrogens.  The modern era has a problem with premature puberty in girls; it may be because they are getting too much estrogen in their system.  There is evidence of some difficulties with male development of boy fetuses whose mothers were using a chemical contraceptive when they conceived.  Three percent of women conceive while they are on the Pill and continue to take the Pill for several weeks, if not months, after they conceive.  Consequently, their male fetuses are getting a lot of extra estrogen into their system.  We don’t have full understanding of the effect of all that estrogen on male fetuses, but it may create some serious difficulties.

[JES1]

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Contraception: Why Not? (part 17)

Posted on October 1, 2009 by Dustmite
This entry is part 21 of 28 in the series Contraception: Why Not?

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

Slide: Elle: Sexual Chemistry

This blurb from Elle, a woman’s fashion magazine, advises that “For years Prozac and the Pill have given women emotional stability and sexual freedom, but new research suggests that these drugs can negatively affect everything from our sex drive to our choice of a mate.”  This article reports that contraceptives and antidepressants both reduce a woman’s sex drive and also change their perception of males.

Why are women taking these antidepressants?  One of the side effects of the Pill is depression.  So doctors try to combat the effects of the Pill by prescribing antidepressant.  But antidepressants also reduce a woman’s sex drive.  So a woman is taking the contraceptive Pill to help her have sex and supposedly be happier and then taking an antidepressant because she’s taking a pill that causes depression.  And she’s not any happier and she doesn’t even want to have sex.

What they’re also discovering is that when women go off the Pill, they’re no longer interested in the man that they’re with.  They picked him when they were in the state of pseudo-pregnancy.  There was another video featured on NBC10.com called “The Divorce Pill”.  It reported that women who go off the Pill have a higher sex drive than they had when they were on the Pill, but they’re no longer interested in the man they are with; they chose him under the influence of the pseudo pregnancy hormones in their bodies.  I suspect there is more to the story than that.  I suspect that many of these women are going off the Pill because they want to have a baby.  When a woman decides to have a baby, she starts looking at guys with a whole different set of eyes.  Is this man going to be a good father to my children?

As a matter of fact, don’t be too impressed if someone comes up to you and says, “I want to have sex with you.”  That’s a saying that’s not particularly flattering.  But if someone comes up to you and says, “I want you to be the parent of my children,” fall over.  That’s a marriage proposal.  And a marriage proposal is one of the most incredible things that anybody’s ever said to another person.  A marriage proposal means, I want someone with your eyes, your laugh, the way you walk and most importantly your values.  I’m going to trust my children to you.  A lot of people have sex with people, but they won’t entrust their children to them.

How many people in our culture court and get married with the view toward having a child?  How many choose a spouse because that spouse will be a good parent?  I tell my students when dating to consider whether the person they are interested in would be a good parent; that person will also make a good spouse, for good parents are generous and responsible and hardworking and such are the qualities that make for a good spouse.

One of my former students who had been a good Catholic went off to graduate school, became completely infatuated with a young man and started having sex with him.  She realized that she was very confused and it wasn’t right.  She stopped having sex with him but was still crazy about him.  It was an incredibly passionate relationship, though not sexual.  He was a very lapsed Catholic and in fact, hated the Church.  She remained in the relationship for about five or six years.   At one point I said, either you have to marry him or you have to break up.  She said she was still crazy about him and didn’t think she could imagine finding another man that fascinates her as much as he did.  But she said, “I don’t want him to be the father of my children.  I want to raise my kids Catholic.  He hates the Church.  I can’t have children with him.”  I recommended that she write those words down and look at them and see what conclusions she ought to draw.  She soon broke up with him and a few years later met and married a wonderful, fascinating man and started a family.

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Contraception: Why Not? (part 16)

Posted on September 29, 2009 by Dustmite
This entry is part 20 of 28 in the series Contraception: Why Not?

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

Slide: Monkeys and Contraception

There is an amazing study reported from a book by a man named Lionel Tiger.  Lionel Tiger is an anthropologist from Rutgers University who studies animal behavior to explain human behavior.  He works with a colleague named Robin Fox, who also is an anthropologist who studies animal behavior to explain human behavior.   In the 1960’s, as he saw contraception becoming more and more popular, he speculated that male/female relationships would change radically.  He did a study in the early ‘70’s that involved a tribe of monkeys.  The alpha monkey of this tribe, named Austin, chose three female monkeys to be his exclusive sexual partners.  Austin had a grand time with these three female monkeys.  Then the researchers injected Austin’s three females with the contraceptive Depo-Provera. Austin stopped having sex with them and chose other female monkeys to be his sexual partners.  Then they contracepted all of the females in the tribe.  The males stopped having sex with the females and started behaving in a turbulent and confused manner.

Male monkeys at least evidently prefer intercourse with fertile females.  Studies also show that males – human males — produce more testosterone when they are around women who have fertile cycles.  In fact, men are more attracted to women when they are fertile and women are more attracted to men when the women are fertile.

Once when I mentioned this at a talk in Kansas, a man came up to me and said, “In Kansas, we don’t need studies to show that males are more interested in females when they’re fertile.”  He said everyone in Kansas grows up on a farm and we know that when a bull is in a pen with a cow who is not fertile, he is not at all interested.  But if the bull is in a barn a mile away with metal fences in between, the bull will get to the cow when she is fertile.

Tiger speculates that one of the reasons that women are dressing so immodestly is because they’re not attracting men because of their fertility.  They have to act as though they will do bizarre things in order to attract a male.  They aren’t attracting them simply by their fertility since they are not having fertile cycles.

Tiger also reports on a study involving tee shirts.  The study included two groups of human females, one contracepting, one not contracepting.  It also involved a group of males who had been rated for their evolutionary desirability.  Men who are evolutionarily desirable are healthy and aggressive and responsible; the other group included those who can’t hold a job, etc.  These men all wore a tee shirt for a day. At the end of the day the women smelled the tee shirts.   Without meeting the males the non contracepting women chose the evolutionarily desirable males as potentially attractive mates; the contracepting women chose the losers.

Mothers have approached me after my talk and said, “That explains a lot.  It explains why my daughter is stuck with that loser.”  Other women say, “Now I understand why my son, who is such a marvelous young man, seems to be having trouble finding good young women.”

Slide: Contraceptive may kill libido

Here we have an article that says contraception may kill libido.  As mentioned, one of the side effects of contraceptives is that it reduces a woman’s sex drive.  Testosterone is also the source of a female’s sexual drive and women who are using chemical contraceptives do not produce as much testosterone as when they are not contracepting.

Here we read that:

  • When women on the Pill were tested, levels of a chemical that wipes out testosterone were found to be seven times higher than in those who had never taken it.
  • Most worryingly, even those who were not on the Pill, but had taken it in the past, had levels up to four times higher than those who had never used it.
  • Past studies had suggested taking the Pill could dampen a woman’s sexual desire, but that if she came off it, her libido would return within a month.
  • Dr Goldstein, former director of the Institute for Sexual Medicine at Boston University, Massachusetts, said that while his research seemed to suggest the effects could be permanent, more investigations were needed.

The website NBC10.com has featured a video that reported this information that the Pill reduces a woman’s sex drive.  So, of course, the solution to this problem was what?  Give women shots of testosterone.  Don’t take them off the Pill: give them shots of testosterone.  What a great idea!

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Contraception: Why Not? (part 15)

Posted on September 28, 2009 by Dustmite
This entry is part 19 of 28 in the series Contraception: Why Not?

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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Contraception: Why Not? (part 14)

Posted on September 27, 2009 by Dustmite
This entry is part 18 of 28 in the series Contraception: Why Not?

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

Slide: Reasons to Condemn Contraception:

The Catholic Church condemns contraception because it is against nature, human nature.  Human nature is complex.  Certainly we are physical creatures and we have an obligation to take care of our physiology.  I made this claim once on TV and the interviewer insisted that the Church doesn’t care about women’s bodies.  I asked where she got that idea?  Today, I’m going provide evidence that contraception harms a woman’s body.  It also harms our psychological nature; it makes women think their fertility is a defect and that, therefore, they are defective.

Human beings are also relational creatures.  We crave love.  We crave both to give love and to receive love.  Such desires are written into the human person.  We want to love and be loved.  The Church teaches that contraception is an impediment to love relationships.

We also, by our very nature, desire to be in relationship with God.  We are by nature spiritual creatures.  We have a yearning to be in a good relationship and in a loving relationship with God.  Contraception is also an obstacle for that relationship since we treat His great gift of fertility as a negative rather than a positive.

Slide: Fertility is a Great Good

Let us consider the effect of contraception on these various levels of nature.

First of all, fertility is a great good.  An adult human being who is fertile is a healthy human being. Those who are infertile are unhealthy.  This slide shows a number of people protesting hormones in food.  A woman shouting at a pro-lifer who is arguing against the abortion pill says to her, “What are you, some kind of nut?”

We live in a culture that is beginning to realize that it’s bad to put chemicals in the air and in the water supply and food.  But women are putting chemicals in their bodies day after day, month after month, year after year, to stop something that’s perfectly healthy.  It simply doesn’t make any sense, especially since women can control their fertility with the very healthy methods of natural family planning.

Slide: Violation of Physical Health

Women who take chemical contraceptives complain of liver troubles, strokes, migraines, high blood pressure, and ovarian cysts.  There are all sorts of bad physical side effects of contraceptives.

Since I’m going to talk mostly about the chemical contraceptives, let me pause for a moment to say a few things about the so-called barrier methods.  First of all, think of how incompatible barriers are with lovemaking.  “I want to make love to you, but I’ve got to get my barrier in place.”  “I’ve got to get my spermicide going.”  “I want to give myself completely, but I’m going to kill your sperm.”  What is loving about that?  Barriers are clearly opposed to an act of real self-giving.  Moreover, semen has within it certain proteins that are beneficial for women; they have a calming and assuring effect on the woman; thus condoms deny women one of the benefits for them from sexual intercourse.

Slide: Common Side Effects

The common side effects of the chemical contraceptives are: increased irritability, increased propensity to depression, weight gain, and a reduced sex drive.  Most women who use chemical contraceptives complain of these side effects.  I’m sure that every woman in this room would like to be taking a pill that makes her more irritable, more prone to depression, helps her gain weight, and contributes to a reduced sex drive.  I’m sure every man in this room wants the woman he’s dealing with to be more irritable, more prone to depression, to gain weight, and have a reduced sex drive.  We have something for you: it’s called the chemical contraceptive.

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Contraception Intermission

Posted on September 26, 2009 by Dustmite
This entry is part 17 of 28 in the series Contraception: Why Not?

As I stated in “Contraception Preamble“, I would provide my comments to this series of posts either as actual comments to each post or in a separate post.  This is my third Contraception Intermission for the series “Contraception: Why Not?” by Professor Smith.

This intermission is just centered around “Contraception: Why Not? (part 13)“.  Reading part 13 once again made me wonder how many of us ever really had a discussion with our perspective spouse in regards to contraception and the role it would or would not play in our future marriage?  How many of us even gave contraception even a personal thought or did any research or even prayed about it?  I know that when I got married it was just a given that we would use birth control and that my wife Heidiwould be the one doing what ever it was with birth control that needed to be done.  We didn’t talk to our pastor or each other, we didn’t study the bible or pray about it nor did we put any effort into knowing how the birth control worked or what it would do to my wife’s body.  After all, it was just part of life.

I think most people are or were no different than my wife and I were.  Something that impacts the marriage in such a intimate way gets nothing more than a cursory glance.  In many instances a “chemical” is used to “alter” the natural biological design and workings of the woman’s body and yet we seem to just shrug our shoulders and act like there is no reason to take a second glance at it let alone a first.  When you stop and think about it, isn’t that just weird?

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