Roundup: "Modeling" Legislation to Control Your Body

CONTRACEPTIVE PILL CUTS RISK OF SERIOUS ILLNESS

Friday March 12 2010

THE contraceptive pill can slash the risk of women dying from serious illnesses including heart disease and cancer, according to new research.

And the Pill is particularly effective at preventing bowel, womb and ovary tumours, which together kill more than 23,000 women each year.

The comprehensive study, carried out over 40 years, also found that any woman who has used the Pill at some stage in her life is 12 per cent less likely to die from illness than those who have never used it.

Those who used it in the longer term were found to have a significantly lower chance of dying from any illness, including heart disease and all cancers. The findings will reassure the millions of women who take the Pill.

http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/162661/Contraceptive-pill-cuts-risk-...

Birth-Control Pills Cut Cancer, Lengthen Women’s Lives in Study

March 11, 2010, 7:16 PM EST

By Michelle Fay Cortez

March 12 (Bloomberg) -- Birth-control pills may lead to longer lives for women, according to a 40-year study that showed users were less likely to die of heart disease, cancer or a range of other medical ailments.

The British report eases concern from early studies that found women who used the contraceptives may be at higher risk of cancer or dying from strokes, particularly those who smoke, the researchers said. The study tracked 46,112 women from throughout the U.K. starting in 1968. Women who took the pill were 12 percent less likely to die from any cause during the study, according to the report in the British Medical Journal.

The findings varied depending on age, though the length of time on the pill had no significant impact, the researchers said. The risk of death was slightly higher in women under age 45 who were current or recent users, though it abated after 10 years. By age 50, the benefits outweighed the risks. Overall, there were 52 fewer deaths than expected for every 100,000 women taking the pill each year, the researchers estimated.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-03-11/birth-control-pills-cut-canc...

Ran across this as an inclusion in "What the Dog Saw" and thought I'd share it.  The whole column is available at the link:

The passion and urgency that animated the birth-control debates of the sixties are now a memory. John Rock still matters, though, for the simple reason that in the course of reconciling his church and his work he made an error. It was not a deliberate error. It became manifest only after his death, and through scientific advances he could not have anticipated. But because that mistake shaped the way he thought about the Pill--about what it was, and how it worked, and most of all what it meant--and because John Rock was one of those responsible for the way the Pill came into the world, his error has colored the way people have thought about contraception ever since.

...

John Rock believed that the Pill was a "natural" method of birth control. By that he didn't mean that it felt natural, because it obviously didn't for many women, particularly not in its earliest days, when the doses of hormone were many times as high as they are today. He meant that it worked by natural means. Women can get pregnant only during a certain interval each month, because after ovulation their bodies produce a surge of the hormone progesterone. Progesterone--one of a class of hormones known as progestin--prepares the uterus for implantation and stops the ovaries from releasing new eggs; it favors gestation. "It is progesterone, in the healthy woman, that prevents ovulation and establishes the pre- and post-menstrual 'safe' period," Rock wrote. When a woman is pregnant, her body produces a stream of progestin in part for the same reason, so that another egg can't be released and threaten the pregnancy already under way. Progestin, in other words, is nature's contraceptive. And what was the Pill? Progestin in tablet form. When a woman was on the Pill, of course, these hormones weren't coming in a sudden surge after ovulation and weren't limited to certain times in her cycle. They were being given in a steady dose, so that ovulation was permanently shut down. They were also being given with an additional dose of estrogen, which holds the endometrium together and--as we've come to learn--helps maintain other tissues as well. But to Rock, the timing and combination of hormones wasn't the issue. The key fact was that the Pill's ingredients duplicated what could be found in the body naturally. And in that naturalness he saw enormous theological significance.

 

In 1951, for example, Pope Pius XII had sanctioned the rhythm method for Catholics because he deemed it a "natural" method of regulating procreation: it didn't kill the sperm, like a spermicide, or frustrate the normal process of procreation, like a diaphragm, or mutilate the organs, like sterilization. Rock knew all about the rhythm method. In the nineteen-thirties, at the Free Hospital for Women, in Brookline, he had started the country's first rhythm clinic for educating Catholic couples in natural contraception. But how did the rhythm method work? It worked by limiting sex to the safe period that progestin created. And how did the Pill work? It worked by using progestin to extend the safe period to the entire month. It didn't mutilate the reproductive organs, or damage any natural process. "Indeed," Rock wrote, oral contraceptives "may be characterized as a 'pill-established safe period,' and would seem to carry the same moral implications" as the rhythm method. The Pill was, to Rock, no more than "an adjunct to nature."

...

These arguments, as arcane as they may seem, were central to the development of oral contraception. It was John Rock and Gregory Pincus who decided that the Pill ought to be taken over a four-week cycle--a woman would spend three weeks on the Pill and the fourth week off the drug (or on a placebo), to allow for menstruation. There was and is no medical reason for this. ... When a woman is on the Pill, however, no egg is released, because the Pill suppresses ovulation. The fluxes of estrogen and progestin that cause the lining of the uterus to grow are dramatically reduced, because the Pill slows down the ovaries. Pincus and Rock knew that the effect of the Pill's hormones on the endometrium was so modest that women could conceivably go for months without having to menstruate. ... More to the point, if Rock wanted to demonstrate that the Pill was no more than a natural variant of the rhythm method, he couldn't very well do away with the monthly menses. Rhythm required "regularity," and so the Pill had to produce regularity as well.

...

In this sense, the Pill really does have a "natural"effect. By blocking the release of new eggs, the progestin in oral contraceptives reduces the rounds of ovarian cell division. Progestin also counters the surges of estrogen in the endometrium, restraining cell division there. A woman who takes the Pill for ten years cuts her ovarian-cancer risk by around seventy per cent and her endometrial-cancer risk by around sixty per cent. But here "natural" means something different from what Rock meant. He assumed that the Pill was natural because it was an unobtrusive variant of the body's own processes. In fact, as more recent research suggests, the Pill is really only natural in so far as it's radical--rescuing the ovaries and endometrium from modernity. That Rock insisted on a twenty-eight-day cycle for his pill is evidence of just how deep his misunderstanding was: the real promise of the Pill was not that it could preserve the menstrual rhythms of the twentieth century but that it could disrupt them.

...

Sulak's paper is a short, dry, academic work, of the sort intended for a narrow professional audience. But it is impossible to read it without being struck by the consequences of John Rock's desire to please his church. In the past forty years, millions of women around the world have been given the Pill in such a way as to maximize their pain and suffering. And to what end? To pretend that the Pill was no more than a pharmaceutical version of the rhythm method?

 

http://www.gladwell.com/2000/2000_03_10_a_rock.htm

Of course, not having access to an abortion, since the teenager was underaged, is what caused her to seek out a "criminal" miscarriage in the first place.  That fact doesn't daunt Wimmer at all, who, in a very candid interview with Alternet admits his final intent is to overturn Roe V Wade and outlaw abortion all together in Utah.

Funnily enough, what that girl felt forced to do is exactly what all women with unwanted pregnancies will have to consider if safe abortion is made illegal. I am certain that prior to that basic legal acknowledgement that women are people and not fresh human dispensers, more commonly known as Roe vs Wade, that being with parasite meant considering dangerous methods to end that situation: poisons, needles, beating, self-injury, resentful parenting that will harm both parent and child for life, or shoving unwanted kids into the foster system where they can almost guarantee they will not be adopted unless they are adorable healthy white newborns.

On the subject of this asshole Wimmer, who the hell does he think he is, trying to legislate when women have children? He deserves to have to personally take care of and pay for every unwanted baby born because of his legislation until they are all 18, regardless of his wishes because like the women he has condemned, his opinion on what becomes of his life will not matter. See how he likes it when "the consequences" of being female in a misogynist society directly affects him, and not some easy-to-ignore, unprivileged "other".

Puh-leeze. We all know who will be targeted, and who will be prosecuted.

This is nothing more than the reinstatement of the two-tiered system of reproductive "justice" that existed prior to RvW.

UMC, connected white women will be exempt from questions, investigation and prosecution.

Open season on everyone else.