Columnist: 50th anniversary of The Pill nothing to celebrate
May 12th, 2010 by Jennifer Walker-Journey
Holly Grigg-Spall, columnist for the UK’s The Independent, says the revolutionary birth control pill had nothing to do with turning her into a women’s health writer and activist. In fact, it gave her something to complain about.
“I’d been popping a drug every morning for years knowing only what my doctor had said: the Pill ‘regulated’ my periods. I had always backed it up with condoms. I had taken it through my teens when I wasn’t having sex. It was an unthinking habit. It took one last switch to another brand, an eye-opening two-month break, then six months back on the Pill to make me realize what it had been doing to my body and my mind throughout my adult life. I came to understand why I felt so very sick,” she writes in a recent column recognizing the Pill’s 50th anniversary.
Over the course of a decade, the writer took four different birth control pills, including Yasmin, a pill also marketed as Yaz in the United States and the UK. Made by Bayer HealthCare, the oral contraceptive has become one of the most widely used birth control pills in the world.
“I was taking the brand Yasmin, which I had requested from my doctor after reading in magazines about its amazing skin-clearing and weight-loss side effects. My sisters and many of my friends were also taking it. Yasmin was marketed aggressively in the US, and news of its supposed benefits spread quickly to young women in the UK. The New York Times recently described Yasmin as the ‘go-to drug brand for women,’ which has been sold as a ‘quality-of-life’ treatment,” Grigg-Spall wrote.
Last year, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) penalized Bayer for overstating the benefits and covering up the risks of Yaz and Yasmin and ordered Bayer to produce commercials that clarified the uses and risks of the drugs. Bayer now faces more than 1,000 lawsuits from women who say they were harmed by the drugs but were not adequately warned of the risks involved. That information was enough to convince Grigg-Spall to look for other alternatives in contraception.
“The Pill is handed out to women with acne, PMS, irregular periods, heavy periods. The Pill has developed into a medication for the disease of being female. In place of changing society, society decided to fix women. On the 50th anniversary of the Pill we should stop celebrating the fictionalized revolution of the Sixties and turn our attention to the rebellion underway today. Young women are ditching the Pill in droves. They have come to see that the Pill can be harmful, as is the sugar coating used to make us swallow.”