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The Sugar Pills in Your Birth Control Pack Were Put There to Placate The Pope
For nearly 60 years, women have been taking the birth control pill in a less than ideal way, and weirdly enough, the reason is not scientific - instead, it can be traced back to the Catholic Church.
The seven inactive pills, included in most oral birth control packets, are not there for a medical reason. Each time a woman pops out a sugar pill, it actually represents a futile attempt to placate the Pope.
[...] One of the gynaecologists working on the pill, John Rock, was Catholic. He knew that in order for the Pill to be accepted by the Catholic Church and its followers, it would have to be sold as a "natural" form of contraception based on hormones already present in the female body.
[...] Their efforts were made in vain. In 1968, years after FDA approval, Pope Paul VI declared all forms of "artificial" contraception to be against church doctrine.
[...] A study from 2014, for instance, found that women who continuously took the pill "fared better in terms of headaches, genital irritation, tiredness, bloating, and menstrual pain."
What's more, some research has found that continuous use of oral contraceptives can help patients manage their endometriosis better, reducing pelvic pain, boosting sexual activity, and generally improving the quality of life for this debilitating condition.
It's taken decades, but medical guidelines are finally catching up to the facts. The United Kingdom's National Health Service (NHS) is the latest government body to shake itself free of this common misconception.
Adhering to the best available evidence and expert consensus, the institute's Faculty of Sexual and Reproductive Healthcare (FSRH) has now admitted that there is no health benefit to a seven-day break from the birth control pill, and, as such, this form of birth control can be taken every day of the month.
The new guidelines argue that the consistent use of oral contraceptives "is associated with a reduced risk of endometrial, ovarian and colorectal cancer", not to mention the benefits of "predictable bleeding patterns, reduction in menstrual bleeding and pain, and management of symptoms of polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), endometriosis and premenstrual syndrome."
(Score: 5, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday January 28 2019, @11:40PM
Sorry folks, but this seems another BS headline. I'd be happy to blame crap on the pope or the Catholic Church (which has done a lot of crap over the years), but I see no clear evidence cited here.
I read TFA. And I was a bit confused about the exact connection. Then I noticed the following weird editorial addendum to the end of TFA:
Huh. That's confusing. So what exactly did they conflate? The headline still implies this was all done to appease the Pope, but was the reason for skipping hormones because women wanted to ensure they weren't pregnant? If so, what does any of this have to do with the Pope? (After all, TFA says he condemned the pill anyway.)
So I searched TFA for a link to its source on this, which appears to be this significantly better and better-researched article [theatlantic.com] in the Atlantic a few years ago.
And if you actually read THAT article searching for the connection to the Pope, you will have trouble finding it. Instead, this is what the Atlantic article says:
So, it wasn't Rock -- the Catholic physician -- who came up with this idea. It apparently Pincus who suggested it -- a researcher who appears to have been from a Jewish family. I sincerely doubt that Pincus would care about appeasing the Pope.
About the only thing in the source article that suggests ANY connection to Catholicism is that last sentence about the resemblance to the "rhythm method," which was basically the only birth control method mildly approved of by the Catholic Church. (For those who may not know the term, the rhythm method" is just avoiding intercourse during the time when a woman is likely to be ovulating/fertile.)
But the original Atlantic article doesn't make any clear connection to appeasing the Pope.
Furthermore, other linked stories about this (such as here [vice.com]) indicate the huge amount of backlash feminists had against a pill that would stop menstruation completely. So even if there was some tenuous connection between a Jewish researcher who suggested this to a Catholic physician back in the 1960s, the reason sugar pills are still there is partly due to feminists who strongly argued against birth control methods that erased periods completely in more recent years.
Reading through the sources in more detail, it seems this connection to the Pope may have been the fantasy of Malcolm Gladwell originally in a 2000 article for the New Yorker. But the way I read the Atlantic article (which seems the best researched of all of these), it seems the real original reason for introducing the "break" in the birth control pill cycle was because women were confused by the symptoms of the pill and thought they might be pregnant. To avoid such false positives, the Jewish head researcher proposed a "break," and then perhaps the Catholic physician went along with it and subsequently promoted the idea because it might have helped make an argument for the Pope.
It's all rather complicated, but I'm certainly ready to declare the headline as unjustified clickbait BS unless someone has a better source for the Pope connection.