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Birth Control’s Most Important Forgotten Anniversary

Published on January 27, 2020

3586 views

Fifty years ago this month, a vibrant group of young women put on their best dresses and placed themselves strategically around the senate gallery. They were eager to disrupt and ready to make some noise but had no idea the impact they were about to make on the course of history. They were attending the opening statements of a controversial look at hormonal birth control that would later became known as the Nelson Pill Hearings.

In 1970, hormonal birth control had been on the market for almost a decade. Although 8.5 million women were already taking The Pill, serious questions about its safety were just coming to the surface. Senator Gaylord Nelson chaired an explosive Congressional committee that set out to answer two simple questions:

Has the safety of hormonal contraceptives been established?
Are women being given sufficient information about the verified risks?

Questioning Birth Control

The hearings remain relevant today because much of the testimony about potential consequences has proven prophetic, and many of the questions raised about side effects continue to be unresolved.

This dive into the subject of oral contraceptives lasted a few months and represented only a small sample of the overall hearings entitled Competitive Problems in the Drug Industry. By the time they concluded, this comprehensive investigation would become the longest running hearings in Congressional history. The committee examined a vast range of issues in the drug industry (most of which are ripe for revisiting today), including questionable pricing practices, deceptive advertising, safety and efficacy of over-the-counter products, generics versus name brands, and a lack of regulation on medical devices. Ultimately, the hearings would fill thirty-three volumes in the Congressional Library. However, nothing in the ten-plus years of hearings came close to matching the energy and excitement of those first few months in 1970.

It all began when feminist writer, Barbara Seaman released her book, The Doctors’ Case Against the Pill. She had expected the book to spark a national outrage but was disappointed by the lack of attention it received. Aware of the drug industry hearings, she saw the symbiotic possibilities and penned a six-page letter to Sen. Nelson outlining some of her gravest concerns.

She had more in common with the senator than she imagined. They both believed they had uncovered some seriously unscrupulous problems with the pharmaceutical industry, and that these critical discoveries had gone largely unnoticed by the public. Sen. Nelson knew he needed a hot-button topic if his hearings were going to generate appropriate publicity, and Ms. Seaman’s letter seemed to deliver exactly what he needed.

Sen. Nelson passed the letter along to his lead staffer, Ben Gordon, and asked him to look into making it part of their hearings. Mr. Gordon worked on Capitol Hill for ten years before joining Sen. Nelson’s staff, and the senator trusted him implicitly. While most Congressional Hearings are coordinated and managed by a large team, Mr. Gordon had a staff of one. He did all the extensive behind-the-scenes legwork on the drug hearings himself. He assembled the roster of experts to testify, wrote the opening statements, and throughout the proceedings, sat next to Chairman Nelson, frequently chiming in with questions and comments of his own. Consequently, it may have been every bit as important that the letter resonate with Mr. Gordon as it had with the senator. It did, and Mr. Gordon eagerly set up a meeting with Ms. Seaman.

Mr. Gordon passed away last July at the age of 105. I was fortunate enough to become friends with him over the last few years of his life and was amazed by his lucidity until the end. He told me that he had first thought he would call Ms. Seaman to testify but, after reading her book, decided to call on the expert physicians she had interviewed. He said he always avoided indirect testimony because it was too easily picked apart. With this decision, Mr. Gordon may have inadvertently set into motion the events that would propel the hearings to headline status above the fold in most of the nation’s major newspapers.

Boston Tea Party for Women’s Health

January 14, 1970, the first day of The Pill hearings, was a typically cold winter morning in Washington D.C. As Sen. Nelson and Mr. Gordon walked to Capitol Hill, they were confronted by protesters. Groups of women walked alongside them yelling their disapproval. Their breath rose visibly through the air, creating the impression they were literally venting steam, but this was only the beginning. A progressive group of young feminists known as D.C. Women’s Liberation, led by Alice Wolfson, had heard that an all-male committee of senators was going to be hearing testimony from all-male doctors about women’s reproductive health. Unbeknownst to the senators, a small group of these women sat waiting in the gallery.

Those in attendance heard the results of new British studies that left Pill proponents in a panic, but they weren’t the only ones growing uncomfortable. Testimony linked The Pill to alarming side effects like breast cancer, depression, heart attacks, and strokes. Fear and uncertainty spread across the women in the senate chambers and would soon blanket the country. Ms. Wolfson and her companions had heard enough. The first of many interruptions came during the testimony of Dr. Philip Corfman from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The nightly news eagerly covered their outrage as the women jumped up and shouted questions like ‘Why isn’t there a pill for men?’ and ‘Why are no women testifying?’ With these outbursts, Ms. Wolfson soon became the face of the hearings.

Mr. Gordon later recalled that most of the early protesters were upset because they felt the senators might have a hidden agenda for going after birth control. However, as the hearings progressed and leading physicians shared their concerns about The Pill’s safety, the outcry from protesters shifted. Suddenly, they began to question why they were being used as guinea pigs by the drug companies in some sort of mass population experiment.

Reflecting upon the events, Ms. Seaman wrote that the Nelson Pill Hearings brought the ‘uptown’ and ‘downtown’ feminists together on the issue of women’s health. Ms. Wolfson and she met for the first time at the hearings and began a lifelong friendship. They went on to co-found the National Women’s Health Network along with three other women. Surprisingly, Dr. Corfman and his wife, Eunice, also became lifelong allies to their cause. Ultimately, the actions and alliances born out of this brief exploration into birth control safety would lead to the hearings later being dubbed “The Boston Tea Party of the Women’s Health Movement.”

Birth Control Hearings Still Relevant

The committee answered a lot of the questions surrounding hormonal contraceptives. Probably the most notable result of the hearings was that The Pill became the first drug ever required to have an information pamphlet in each package, not for doctors, but for the patient. Unfortunately, those pamphlets are clunky, verbose, incomprehensible, and astoundingly incomplete. Their glaring omissions raise new questions about informed consent, as do the deaths of many young women from birth control related blood clots.

Proof that the hearings aren’t merely ancient history to be forgotten came in 2011, when the FDA commissioned a study and found that new, fourth generation formulations, which include bestsellers Yaz and Yasmin, doubled the risk of blood clots over the already elevated risk found with other hormonal contraceptives. They assembled an advisory panel of 26 experts to discuss possible action. After much debate, 15 of the experts voted that the benefits still outweighed the risks. However, 21 of the 26 voted that these formulations should contain stronger warnings for patients.

As of January 2016, the drug companies had paid out over $2 billion to settle more than 10,000 blood clot lawsuits brought against these newest formulations, and the number of injuries, deaths, and lawsuits continues to rise.

On this 50^th anniversary of the Nelson Pill Hearings, perhaps the greatest lesson we can take away is that the battle has just begun. Our country’s independence wasn’t won in 1773 at The Boston Tea Party. Rather, it was the start of a movement. It is incumbent upon all of us who care about women’s health to take up the torch of those protesters from the hearings fifty years ago. We need to demand answers. And, it all begins with two simple questions:

Has the safety of hormonal contraceptives been established?
Are women being given sufficient information about the verified risks?

Thank you

Alice Wolfson is now a retired attorney living in San Francisco. That’s her featured in the photo above. You can see actual footage from the protests here. I would like to thank her for taking the time to visit with me and for offering her guidance and perspective on this article. Alice, your energy is infectious. May it continue to inspire those of us devoted to women’s health.

For more information about the history of hormonal birth control:

#1

37 customer reviews

Books

In the Name of The Pill*

by Mike Gaskins

The FDA approved The Pill despite it not being proven safe. Today, it has been linked to everything from blood clots and cancer to lupus and Crohn’s disease — and still has not been proven safe.
This book explores the medical and historical disconnects that brought us to this point.

Price: $ 17.95

Price incl. VAT., Excl. Shipping

Last updated on October 21, 2023 at 9:38 pm – Image source: Amazon Affiliate Program. All statements without guarantee.

We Need Your Help

More people than ever are reading Hormones Matter, a testament to the need for independent voices in health and medicine. We are not funded and accept limited advertising. Unlike many health sites, we don’t force you to purchase a subscription. We believe health information should be open to all. If you read Hormones Matter, like it, please help support it. Contribute now.

FAM Becoming a Fave: Millennial Women and Birth Control

FDA Birth Control Petition

Published on July 22, 2019

2479 views

If you’ve ever watched a sporting event, you’re probably familiar with the unpredictable nature of ‘momentum.’ It’s that stretch of a game where everything suddenly seems to be going right for your team. Every pass hits its mark. Impossible plays are made. Every loose ball bounces your way. As the name implies, it feels like your team is ramping up to an unstoppable velocity. It’s exciting to experience, and it leaves you with no doubt that your team will win.

I feel like we’re seeing a similar momentum building for Fertility Awareness Methods (FAM), and you can sense it among the ‘fans.’ If you spend much time in fertility or birth control circles, you will soon see that FAM advocates are kind of the CrossFit evangelists of this sphere. They want to tell everyone about this great thing they’ve found… and with good reason.

The Sport of Charting

Using a sports analogy in relation to fertility charting may seem far-fetched, but tracking menstrual cycles actually played a pretty big role in the US Women’s National Soccer Team’s recent victory at the World Cup. Dawn Scott, the team’s high performance coach told Good Morning America this week, “I feel like it’s one of many strategies that we deployed that helped us win.”

The team tracked each player’s cycle and her symptoms and then installed practices to help maximize her performance. Georgie Bruinvels, a research scientist who consulted with the team, said, “Hormonal fluctuations can affect things like biomechanics, laxity of ligaments and muscular firing patterns…the first half of the cycle and particularly the build-up to ovulation is the key risk window.” And, in fact, injuries like torn ACLs have been shown to be more prominent during this time.

Of course, athletic performance isn’t the main reason young women have begun to embrace fertility charting.

Status Quo a No Go for Hormonal Birth Control

It’s almost become a meme-like punch line to pontificate on the number of customs and businesses that Millennials are killing, but there is truth behind the notion that this generation doesn’t just accept the status quo. Market research shows that, even though many of them are in debt, they are willing to spend more on products that promote sustainability. They also prioritize health and wellness. So, Millennials may actually be killing the enigmatic stereotype of the health-conscious woman who goes out of her way to avoid synthetic steroids in her food, but then ingests a massive dose of them in her birth control.

More and more young women are questioning the wisdom of throwing their bodies out of its natural balance. They’re not just listening to what the doctor says (or doesn’t say), and they’re researching for themselves. That questioning of the status quo has led many of them to discover FAMs. Consequently, they are eager to share what they’ve found with their Pill-taking friends- especially when they hear them complain about their side effects.

Tech Tracking

The perception of FAMs has evolved significantly over the years. In the early days, the original Creighton Model and Billings Method were often disparagingly referred to as Catholic birth control. Even today, some out-of-touch doctors still confuse FAMs with the antiquated and unreliable rhythm method.

FAMs are anything but antiquated, and they’re not just for Catholics anymore. Modern devices, like the Daysy fertility monitor help women track their fertility. There are also hundreds of online apps available for a multitude of fertility methods, which allow women to chart their cycle on any operating system.

A Change of Tune

This shift in attitudes surrounding birth control is bound to have put pressure on government agencies that deal with these matters. Just a few weeks ago, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) changed their reported failure rate for FAMs. After conducting a literature review, they changed from 24% as their previous failure rate to what is now posted as “2% to 23%.”

Having the CDC admit that the failure rate for FAMs could be as low as 2% is a major momentum shift. Hopefully, that momentum will continue as another government agency, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), now considers a petition brought forth by a group of doctors and women’s health advocates requesting that Depo Provera be removed from the market, and that new black box warnings be added to remaining hormonal birth control. These new warnings would reflect the wealth of data linking these drugs to a vast array of side effects not currently contained in the warnings. By the way, this is a great way to add your voice to the mix, as the petition is currently under review at the FDA. You can add your comment about birth control by visiting this link:

The Next Generation

It appears as though this momentum will continue into the future as FAM advocates have revealed they are committed to the long game. For example, BOMA-USA, the Billings Ovulation Method Association recently announced a capital campaign to begin training young healthcare practitioners in the method.

Craig Turczynski Ph.D., Director of Development and Strategic Planning at BOMA-USA, explained the thought behind the capital campaign, “The idea is that if we train the next generation, they will be the ones making decisions on school content in the future. We will also help those practicing already make the switch away from contraceptives by offering phone consultation with physicians experienced with fertility awareness methods. That way they are not alone trying to make treatment decisions.”

I’m excited about this plan to bring young practitioners on board. So often, young women tell me about doctors pushing them to get on hormonal birth control from a young age, saying it will treat everything from acne to heavy periods. Yet, these same doctors have very little accurate information about FAMs. By giving the next generation of doctors an alternative to hormonal birth control, we will be giving the next generation of women healthier choices as well.

Read more about why women might choose FAMs over hormonal birth control in my book, In the Name of The Pill.

#1

37 customer reviews

Books

In the Name of The Pill*

by Mike Gaskins

The FDA approved The Pill despite it not being proven safe. Today, it has been linked to everything from blood clots and cancer to lupus and Crohn’s disease — and still has not been proven safe.
This book explores the medical and historical disconnects that brought us to this point.

Price: $ 17.95

Price incl. VAT., Excl. Shipping

Last updated on October 21, 2023 at 9:38 pm – Image source: Amazon Affiliate Program. All statements without guarantee.

We Need Your Help

More people than ever are reading Hormones Matter, a testament to the need for independent voices in health and medicine. We are not funded and accept limited advertising. Unlike many health sites, we don’t force you to purchase a subscription. We believe health information should be open to all. If you read Hormones Matter, like it, please help support it. Contribute now.

Photo by Courtney Cook on Unsplash.

New Birth Control Warnings

To read and sign the petition, click here.

Published on May 16, 2019

2949 views

The FDA just received a Citizen’s Petition submitted by a group of physicians, scientists, and women’s health advocates regarding side effects caused by hormonal birth control. After a comprehensive review of literature, the petitioners believe there is enough compelling evidence to warrant new and more forceful warnings for all hormonal birth control products. I am humbled to have been invited to collaborate during the final stages of this project.

If approved, new black box warnings would specifically advise women of increased risks associated with breast cancer, cervical cancer, inflammatory bowel disease, systemic lupus erythematosus, venous thrombosis, cardiovascular events, depression, and suicide. The petition also requests that additional information be provided to patients regarding birth control’s link to multiple sclerosis, interstitial cystitis, bone fractures, as well as its effect on body mass. Finally, the petitioners request that Depo Provera be removed from the market “based on conclusive evidence that it facilitates the transmission of HIV from men to women.”

The Consequences of Birth Control

Adjunct Professor of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, Deacon William V. Williams M.D. began reviewing contraceptive studies for an article he was going to write for the 50th anniversary of the papal encyclical letter titled, Humanae Vitae. The letter came out in 1968 at a time when the Catholic Church was under enormous pressure to change its teachings on contraceptives. The rest of the world, including other Christian denominations, had embraced birth control. Many anticipated the letter would be Pope Paul VI’s official capitulation. Instead, he boldly explained why the Church would never accept contraception and offered numerous warnings that have proven to be quite prophetic.

As the editor of the Linacre Quarterly, the official, peer-reviewed academic journal of the Catholic Medical Association, Dr. Williams felt a golden-anniversary nod was fitting for this important papal document. Along with some of his colleagues, he began to review scientific literature related to some of the effects of hormonal contraceptives. As the overwhelming evidence began to mount, the group cross-referenced prescribing information for several birth control products and realized many of these side effects weren’t listed – even though there was a pretty large set of peer-reviewed data available.

That’s when the group realized that this called for action beyond the originally planned article. The shocking amount of empirical data being withheld from hormonal contraceptive users represented a serious women’s health issue. They invited others to collaborate and decided a petition to the FDA was in order.

Double Standards

Kathleen Raviele, M.D., an Atlanta-area Ob/Gyn was on the team that assembled the petition. She points out that drugs with fewer risks, such as Vioxx, have been removed from the market because they affected both men and women. She says, “Women deserve respect and certainly deserve to know the risks they are exposed to with going on any hormonal contraceptive. An article in Vanity Fair in February 2014 detailed three women who lost their lives or nearly so using the NuvaRing and this should have prompted a recall of the product, but instead the company continues to tout it as: ‘The birth control ring (AKA NuvaRing) is a safe, simple, and affordable birth control method that you wear inside your vagina.’”

However, she adds that the blame doesn’t just lie at the feet of the drug companies. She explains, “Providing contraception represents one-third of an Ob-Gyn’s practice, and in the back of their minds they think this will hurt the number of patients coming to see them. However, even for medical problems often treated with hormonal contraceptives, there is always a better, safer way to manage the problem that gets to the cause rather than acting as a cover-up.”

Mrs. Information

Aside from asking the FDA to include new warnings, the petition also requests that current warnings be modified for clarity. For example, there is significant evidence dating back to the late 1960s that suggests hormonal birth control contributes to a higher risk of stroke and heart attack for any woman taking it. That already elevated risk rises even higher for women who are over 35 and smoke.

The warning on some formulations currently reads, “WARNING: CIGARETTE SMOKING AND SERIOUS CARDIOVASCULAR EVENTS.” In fact, the warnings in many formulations are worded in a way that renders them completely ineffective. An argument is made in the petition that, “This is misleading and has shown to be misinterpreted by many women who infer that the increased risk only occurs with cigarette smoking and/or with being over 35 years of age.”

The petition also contends that it should be required that these warnings be included in all direct-to-consumer advertising.

Was It Really Consensual?

Despite the misleading and missing information withheld from the current patient information pamphlets, there are still a lot of unsavory side effects that are listed. However, with the complicated text printed in an unreadable, tiny font, it isn’t surprising that so few women know what they’re getting into when they start taking birth control. What is surprising is how few doctors seem to recognize the dangers. Many still proclaim that the benefits outweigh the risks.

Speaking to this apparent disconnect, Dr. Williams said, “Doctors who say the benefits of hormonal birth control still outweigh the risks are victims of the groupthink mentality in the medical profession right now. It goes something like this – people are going to have sex, and because they are going to have sex, we need to make sure they don’t suffer the consequences. Therefore, we need to prescribe The Pill to prevent pregnancy. That’s just the way doctors are trained to think. They’re not trained to think that in front of me is an individual who can make their own choices for better or for worse, who has a free will, and who, rightly informed, can make the right choices.”

The mentality Dr. Williams describes in today’s medical industry sounds eerily similar to Plato’s description of doctors of slaves versus the doctor of free people. The slave’s doctor visits the patient in a hurry with a lack of compassion. He “neither gives a servant any rational account of his complaint, nor asks him for any; he gives an order based on empirical belief with the air of exact knowledge, in the insolent manner of a tyrant, then jumps off to the next ailing servant.”

Ultimately, the goal of this petition is to pave the way to a better conversation – one more akin to what should be expected as free people. Plato described this approach as the doctor entering into a discourse with the patient. Through this discourse, the doctor is at once gathering information and instructing the patient to make the best choices for his/her health.

Putting the goal of the petition in its simplest terms, Dr. Williams explained, “We’re trying to make sure that when patients give informed consent to use this stuff that it’s actually informed. It’s not just consent.”

Weighing Outcomes

For her part, Dr. Raviele doesn’t have much faith that this scholarly petition will be taken seriously by the FDA. However, she does see another way it could ultimately serve its purpose. She described what she sees as the more practical possibility, “What this petition may do is give lawyers more ammunition for suing the drug companies over the harmful effects of these hormones on women and girls. These companies will not take them off the market voluntarily. It will only be through multiple lawsuits.”

We Need Your Help

More people than ever are reading Hormones Matter, a testament to the need for independent voices in health and medicine. We are not funded and accept limited advertising. Unlike many health sites, we don’t force you to purchase a subscription. We believe health information should be open to all. If you read Hormones Matter, like it, please help support it. Contribute now.

Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash

Read more about birth control’s vast problems in my new book, In the Name of The Pill.

#1

37 customer reviews

Books

In the Name of The Pill*

by Mike Gaskins

The FDA approved The Pill despite it not being proven safe. Today, it has been linked to everything from blood clots and cancer to lupus and Crohn’s disease — and still has not been proven safe.
This book explores the medical and historical disconnects that brought us to this point.

Price: $ 17.95

Price incl. VAT., Excl. Shipping

Last updated on October 21, 2023 at 9:38 pm – Image source: Amazon Affiliate Program. All statements without guarantee.

The Next Step in Birth Control Activism

Published on May 9, 2019

2458 views

Birth Control Activism and Women's Health

In recent hearings on Capitol Hill, freshman Representative Lauren Underwood challenged Labor Secretary Alex Acosta on his Cabinet department’s efforts to allow insurance exemptions to employers who wish not to cover birth control for religious reasons. She told him, “Women’s lives and their health depend on their ability to access contraceptives.” Then, citing the many women who take contraceptives to treat polycystic ovarian syndrome, endometriosis, and anemia, she continued, “Your actions, sir, are denying science and putting American women at risk.”

Can we put the religious debate aside and talk honestly about the science and the risks to women for a moment?

Caring About Women’s Health

Women’s health care has grown into something very different than caring about women’s health. If we actually cared about their health, we would want women to know the truth about their options. We would want their informed consent to be informed.

I get that hormonal birth control is frequently prescribed off-label, not to prevent pregnancy, but in response to some underlying issue. Sometimes it’s a serious condition, like those mentioned by Rep. Underwood, and sometimes it’s a not-so-serious condition, like acne or slightly irregular periods.

When I’ve spoken with women about the dangers of birth control, a surprising number of them have told me that off-label issues caused them to go on The Pill. I think of one young lady in particular who told me she really didn’t want to go on birth control, but her periods were too heavy. She literally had a period that lasted 30 days, making her terribly weak. She said The Pill helped regulate her periods.

In instances like this, the problem is that The Pill really isn’t regulating the period, nor is it treating anything. It’s only masking the underlying medical issue. We wouldn’t put a band-aid on a patient who appears to have a flesh-eating bacteria and think we’ve done our job, but that’s essentially what we do with these hormonal ‘treatments.’

There has to be a better option, an actual treatment, for women like this young lady. I’m not a medical professional so I don’t know what it would be, but I’ve taken this stance regarding the multitude of off-label prescriptions: I may not have all the answers, but that doesn’t mean I’m obliged to accept the doctors’ answers – and neither are the women suffering these conditions.

A recent conversation I had with an Ob/Gyn validated that position. She explained why Ob/Gyns are hesitant to consider cutting back on birth control prescriptions:

“Providing contraception represents one-third of an Ob-Gyn’s practice, and in the back of their minds they think [reducing birth control prescriptions] will hurt the number of patients coming to see them. However, even for medical problems often treated with hormonal contraceptives, there is always a better, safer way to manage the problem that gets to the cause rather than acting as a cover-up.”

Women Deserve Better

In my new book, In the Name of The Pill, I tell the story of Anthony, a father emboldened by the death of his 20-year-old daughter, Alex, after only 8 months on The Pill. Anthony reached out to me when he read my article on Hormones Matter, which posted the very day his daughter died. In it, I discussed the many young women we have lost to birth control, and my hopes that one of these stories might trigger a chain reaction that would inspire women to stop taking The Pill.

Anthony is determined to prevent other families from experiencing the pain his family will endure for the rest of their days. I admire his tenacity. Every day, he posts informative stories and articles on social media with the frequent hashtag – #womendeservebetter.

He strikes up conversations with women about their birth control and attempts to alert them to the dangers. He told me that women are often outraged when he tells them about the Nelson Pill Hearings because they can’t believe that the vast multitude of risks have been known for over 50 years. That is the crux of the problem.

How many young women even know that The Pill has been linked to cancer, depression, and autoimmune disease? The answer is “not enough.”

The History of Birth Control Risks

If you’ve read any of my previous articles, you may know I’m slightly obsessed with the Nelson Pill Hearings. Held in 1970, these Congressional hearings featured leading physicians who exposed the diverse complications just beginning to be associated with The Pill. These warnings were largely ignored, but the reason the hearings are still relevant today is because the drug industry continues to act surprised when new studies connect hormonal birth control to the very same complications.

Imagine you’re a young woman who visited the doctor this morning and were diagnosed with lupus. You question the timing because you just started birth control weeks ago, and suspect it may have something to do with your diagnosis. When you find out that doctors 50 years ago recognized the increased risk of developing lupus among birth control users, you’re likely to become more than a little angry – and justifiably so. This is important information that should have been shared with you before you began taking The Pill.

And, it isn’t just lupus. Anthony’s daughter died from blood clots in her lungs. He said he had no idea how dangerous birth control was until after it was too late for Alex, and he’s sure she hadn’t been sufficiently warned either. He told me, “It’s easy to find articles about how The Pill helps your acne or menstrual pain, but to learn how dangerous these things are you really have to dig and know what you’re looking for.”

We have to do more to bring the dangers to light. I believe this calls for a new level of activism, but once again, I don’t have all the answers. I just know I want to do something more. I write these articles. I’ve written a book. I talk about birth control with nearly every young woman I meet, but I WANT TO DO MORE. I know there are many of us who have awoken to the dangers of this potent drug, and we all want to do more.

What more can we do? And, how can we collectively organize our efforts? Next year marks the 50^th anniversary of the Nelson Pill Hearings, and many of the topics discussed at the hearings deserve further investigation. I think we should band together and demand that Congress revisit the hearings. We should ask them to simply address the same two questions Senator Gaylord Nelson attempted to answer in 1970:

Whether The Pill (and all other hormonal contraceptives) have been proven safe
Whether women are being given sufficient information about the possible dangers.

I’d like your suggestions on how we can make this push. Please share any ideas you have in the comments section below.

#1

37 customer reviews

Books

In the Name of The Pill*

by Mike Gaskins

The FDA approved The Pill despite it not being proven safe. Today, it has been linked to everything from blood clots and cancer to lupus and Crohn’s disease — and still has not been proven safe.
This book explores the medical and historical disconnects that brought us to this point.

Price: $ 17.95

Price incl. VAT., Excl. Shipping

Last updated on October 21, 2023 at 9:38 pm – Image source: Amazon Affiliate Program. All statements without guarantee.

We Need Your Help

More people than ever are reading Hormones Matter, a testament to the need for independent voices in health and medicine. We are not funded and accept limited advertising. Unlike many health sites, we don’t force you to purchase a subscription. We believe health information should be open to all. If you read Hormones Matter, like it, please help support it. Contribute now.

Hormoneously Alone: Pill Withdrawal Syndrome from Hell

by Raquel Latona

Published on April 3, 2019

49214 views

It was two months since I had stopped taking The Pill. Might I add, I hate how culturally grammatical we have to be when we write, “The Pill”. THE Pill is how I read it. It’s 2019, and it all still seems so covertly retro. Anyway, it is hard to go back in time because the thoughts of what transpired the year I came off The Pill still overwhelm me. I had never really agreed with the notion of loading ourselves with synthetic hormone, and in fact, for 70% of my sexually active life, I used other very successful methods. Regardless, I was in my early 20’s, and like most, decided to hop on the Pill for a couple more years until I knew I had found the guy of my dreams. Well, the time came, I was in a great relationship, I felt safe and comfortable emotionally, as well as financially, and I made the choice to come off. I popped the last little pink pill on January 19^th, 2017. Fast forward to March 10^th, 2017 and here is where it all started.

Peripheral Nerve Symptoms

I woke up with severe, I can’t stress the word “severe” enough, pins and needles in my hands and feet. That feeling you get when you lay too long on a limb, numb it out, and then feel the tingling- that feeling. So, I thought I had slept weird, and continued on with my day, but by night, the severity hadn’t changed. I woke up the next morning, still feeling this tingling but it was now accompanied by extreme feelings of weakness in my arms and legs. The strange part was that I wasn’t actually weak. I was able to lift heavy items like normal, it was just the feeling of weakness. Did I have a stroke? This is where the anxiety started to kick in. I have struggled with anxiety my whole life but over the next 3 months, I had never experienced such an extreme form of anxiety and depression like this. I was in the prime of my life, 25 years old, and I had never felt worse. I had this intense tingling in my hands and feet, weakness throughout my arms and legs, and an unremitting dismal and gloomy cloud following me. I started to research, and although mistakenly started to self-diagnose with brain tumors, Multiple Sclerosis, Lupus, Autoimmune, I ultimately thought I was deficient in electrolytes or vitamins, and bought a Gatorade. Well, that didn’t help either.

Brain Fog and Depersonalization

I decided to take a few days off from work, get a massage and do a few yoga classes. It was a week since these feelings started, and the brain fog was coming in strong. If anyone has ever had this brain fog symptom, I would almost say it’s more debilitating than depression itself. The cloud of depression that hangs over your head is now in your head. Brain fog is like depersonalization, you’re really not sure if you’re even here on this earth, you feel so distant and detached from life, it’s scary. The massage helped me feel a bit better, not so tense, I was able to take a few deep breaths and have a few seconds of peace. When I went into the yoga classes, I would sit in the back. My goal was just to breathe and relax my body and my mind. Well, the second the teacher started, I had waterfalls of tears flowing out of my eyes. Until this day, I couldn’t tell you why that was happening in each class but if that’s not a major sign of depression, I don’t know what is.

Buzzing Bees in My Spine and Brain

The tingling and weakness wasn’t going away. It was now the end of April and my period was two weeks late. I then started to wake up in the middle of the night with a feeling of buzzing bees up my spine and in my brain. The feeling was so off-putting and disturbing, I couldn’t fall back asleep. I would get hot flashes- peri-menopause? At 25? No way. My eyes would randomly hurt. My teeth would randomly hurt. I would have crazy sinus issues. There were times where I was so tired I would take the day off because I couldn’t move. I felt debilitated. I was not myself. I even thought about going on disability.

Could it be the Pill? Absolutely Not, Says Every Doctor.

All my life healthy, I was a kickboxing instructor, an everyday gym goer, something was just not right. It was time to go to the doctor. Getting an urgent appointment with the Gyno is nearly a battle in itself, especially when you call and say, “Something weird is going on in my body, I’m not sure what it is”. Next appointment, 3 weeks away. So I went to the walk in clinic near my house, blood pressure: 150/110. I had never seen such high numbers. Diagnoses – anxiety, solution-anti depressants. No thank you. Something more was going on inside. I have been getting my period almost to the day since I was 12 years old, that’s 13 years of consistency. I’m not pregnant and 2 weeks late? No, something is wrong hormonally. I went to my primary care physician. They did blood work, checked me up and down – nothing. Again, my blood pressure read: 145/108, diagnoses-anxiety, solution-relax. I went to the Gyno, and was told “there’s no way these symptoms are from coming off The Pill.” Shocked, I asked why it couldn’t be, she replied, “The Pill is something that needs to be taken every day because it gets metabolized within 24 hours, so if you haven’t taken a pill since January, it’s no longer in your system. You should get other testing done.” I know that, I did that, but trying to convince someone with a much higher education in this field, an expert in fact, was going nowhere. I knew it was up to me to do my own research and trust what my body was telling me.

Women Know Better

I hopped back online and googled, “hormonal imbalance symptoms”, “after the pill reactions”, “what birth control really does to you”- the list goes on. It had been four months since these symptoms started. I finally came across an amazing blog post where there were 10 pages of women expressing the same symptoms as me after coming off the Pill. It was the most comforting moment of my life. I knew I wasn’t making these symptoms up. This wasn’t all anxiety. This was real; for me, for them, for everyone who had come off the Pill and felt a huge difference in their body. In my adult years, I shied away from publicly posting my feelings and connecting with people virtually, but, I felt like if I didn’t participate, if I didn’t help, that would just be immoral and unethical.

What was interesting to me was that we all initially thought MS or brain tumor. All of our symptoms happened about two months after we took the last pill and all of the symptoms lasted on average 8-9 months. Almost all of us had blood work, CT scans, MRI’s, and all of us came back negative on every test. We exchanged advice about best foods, herbs, and practices that were helping us, and consoled each other in this grueling sea of unknown. Every one of us were told that it wasn’t due to coming off The Pill, and every one of us didn’t believe it. It was from The Pill, it is from The Pill.

Ultimately, this takes time, a healthy lifestyle and patience. Some doctors will say, go back on the Pill to help it, but that seems counter-intuitive to me. When this reaction becomes so real and tormenting, the Pill is the most frightening thing and the furthest from the cure or the answer. I’ve researched endlessly for the past two years, and only recently see the term coined, “Post Birth Control Syndrome”. It’s catchy, for sure, but the description isn’t quite as accurate. There are weirder, stranger symptoms that happen than just the irregular periods, acne, and weight change; that to me seems like it skims the surface, that’s easy stuff comparably.

I’m happy to report that I feel back to normal, but this experience will never leave my mind. Through it all, I feel the injustices for women are brought about because of a terrible patient care system with limited time and awareness in an ever turning patient revolving door. I produced a documentary entitled, “Hormoneously Alone,” now out on YouTube, to shed light on these issues among others involving The Pill.

We’re all in this together, but with the lack of education, awareness and openness, we all may as well be alone.

If you or someone you know has had similar experiences coming off of the Pill, or if you would like to share your story, message me here, I would love to hear from you.

In Health,

Raquel Latona

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Birth Control Ain’t Right (But Neither Should It Be Left)

Published on December 13, 2018

2542 views

I’m writing this article with all the trepidation of someone walking into a Thai restaurant with a peanut allergy — knowing it could go horribly wrong.

I want to discuss politics. More precisely, I want to talk about a political fight by apolitical means. When it really comes down to it, hormonal birth control and women’s health transcend politics – or at least they should. It’s easy to lose sight of that in today’s political climate.

Lupus and Birth Control

An item came across my news feed this morning that caught my eye. It wasn’t a news story, but a letter to the editor of a coastal newspaper. The writer mentioned the increasing incidence of lupus in young women caused by hormonal contraceptives (the keywords that landed it in my newsfeed). Wow! That’s a connection very few people have made. I wanted to read more.

But when I opened the letter, it was a political diatribe from a woman who was all over the map. She talked about Republicans using the Honduran caravan to get votes. She blamed the caravan on overpopulation caused by poverty stemming from a Latino machismo perpetuated by the Catholic Church. She accused conservatives of trying to outlaw birth control. I was with her when it came to the facts (or fact), but she lost me in her rhetoric – and it’s not even about whether I lean Right or Left. Let me explain:

The increased incidence of lupus in young women on birth control is a fact. We should all be concerned about this and be engaged in dialogue on how to fix it.
Politicization of the Honduran caravan is opinion. In fact, the rhetoric has gone both ways. Depending on where you get your opinion-news, you could believe the caravan was likely being funded by either Donald Trump or George Soros.
The overpopulation-poverty-machismo-Catholic theory is opinion. I don’t even know where to begin, but I guess there’s always a way to blame the Catholic Church when you’re talking about birth control.
Conservatives trying to outlaw birth control is opinion. I know some will argue that it’s a fact, but I haven’t seen any evidence of this. Living in Texas, I have a number of ultra-conservative friends, and I have never had anyone approach me with the suggestion that we outlaw birth control – and that’s with knowing how much I hate The Pill. To the contrary, I’ve actually been accused of being anti-capitalism because of my attacks on the drug industry and birth control.

Divided We Fall

Women’s health is worth the fight! Lupus induced by birth control is not only the lede; it’s the story. If we can agree on that, then I really don’t care who you think funded the caravan. If we can unite in agreement that birth control is harming women by means of breast cancer, blood clots, Multiple Sclerosis, suicide, infertility, Crohn’s Disease, diabetes… should it really matter to me whether I’m linking arms with a Republican or a Democrat?

I know it may be pie-in-the-sky to think we can rise above political affiliation in this day and age, but we should. This has been going on for far too long.

As far back as 1970, the Nelson Pill Hearings revealed many of the horrible complications linked to birth control. The news coming from the hearings was so devastating that women across the country began to call their doctors asking to be taken off The Pill. If you view politics through a lens of only the past decade or so, it might seem hard to believe that it was a Democratic senator who chaired the hearings, and it was a young Republican senator from Kansas who defended The Pill. Sen. Bob Dole virtually attacked every doctor who testified about troubling side effects.

Ben Gordon, who was Sen. Gaylord Nelson’s lead staffer said, “Dole was on our committee, and when he came, there was no question he was representing the industry.”

The industry has always been organized in promoting and defending its product. Unfortunately, the era surrounding the Nelson Pill Hearings is as close as the opposition has ever come to being organized and unified.

United We Stand

The hearings brought together doctors from all different specialties who felt The Pill had been forced upon them despite insufficient testing. Suddenly, the media was paying attention to doctors, journalists, and authors who had been expressing serious concerns about birth control safety. Perhaps most important, women (many of whom were hearing about these serious side effects for the first time) began to unite.

Alice Wolfson became the face of the hearings after bringing them to a brief halt. Along with several other young feminists, she had come to the hearings with plans to protest the senators, who she felt weren’t really listening to the voices of women. However, after hearing the testimony of several doctors, she famously stood up in the chambers and shouted, “Why are 10 million women being used as guinea pigs!?”

She became fast friends with Barbara Seaman, whose book, The Doctor’s Case Against the Pill, helped launch the hearings. Ms. Seaman later wrote about the hearings saying it brought the “uptown” and “downtown” feminists together on the issue of birth control safety. She and Ms. Wolfson would go on to found the National Women’s Health Network. To this day, it is one of the nation’s top women’s health advocacy groups.

Shouldn’t Be Left (Alone)

With all of this organized opposition to The Pill, what did the hearings accomplish?

Well, The Pill became the first drug ever required to have a patient information booklet included in each pack. I suppose that would be pretty significant if it had been written in laymen terms so people could actually understand it.

And, the drug industry responded by releasing new, lower-dose formulations, which they claimed were safer. Unfortunately, their testing was even less stringent than it had been in the original trials. In fact, none of subsequent generations of hormonal birth control have been proven to be safe.

Clearly, what we as the opposition have done thus far hasn’t been enough. It’s time for more hearings. It’s time to hold the drug companies accountable for the sad state of women’s health. It doesn’t serve you or me – it doesn’t serve the Republicans or Democrats to have women suffering with chronic ailments or even dying in the name of birth control. In the end, it only serves the bottom line of Big Pharma. Maybe that’s what they’re referring to when they keep telling us ‘the benefits still outweigh the risks.’

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More Side Effects From Birth Control- The Liver and the Gallbladder

by Kerry Gretchen

Published on December 3, 2018

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birth control liver and gallbladder damage

This time of year, the holiday season, can be a time of overindulgence for many of us. And how can we talk about overindulgence without taking a look at the liver? To say the liver is important is an understatement. It is the body’s largest gland and while estimates of the number of functions of the liver vary, many textbooks generally cite around 500. Nearly everything we ingest, from drugs and alcohol to vitamins and nutrients, is metabolized by the liver. The vital role it plays in the functioning of our bodies makes the testimony from the 1970 Nelson Pill Hearings about the effects of oral contraceptives on the liver that much scarier.

Research Presented at the Nelson Pill Hearings

Dr. Victor Wynn was one of the first physicians to testify about the effects of hormonal birth control on the liver.

On page 6341 he states, “if you will take cells out of the liver and examine them under the electromicroscope of women taking oral contraceptive medication, you will find some extraordinary changes.” Of these and other changes caused by the pill, he says: “When I say these changes occur, I mean they occur in everybody, more in some than in others, but no person entirely escapes from the metabolic influence of these compounds. It is merely that some manifest the changes more obviously than others.”

Later to testify was Dr. William Spellacy who was specifically called upon to speak about the metabolic effects on the liver. His testimony about the liver begins, “The biochemical effects of the sex hormones on the liver are legion.” Below is a list of liver functions that, based on the research presented in Dr. Spellacy’s testimony, are altered or impaired (NPH 6427):

Lowering of total plasma protein level
Decrease in the albumin and gamma globulin and increases in other fractions
Tests may be abnormal in women on oral contraceptives without disease being present
Estrogen (including that in oral contraceptives) interferes with liver function and varies with dosage
Some women taking oral contraceptives have abnormally high blood bilirubin levels
1/3 of women who have jaundice on oral contraceptives will get it when pregnant
Discontinuation of oral contraceptives “cures” jaundice

He summed up his thoughts on the liver damage caused by hormonal birth control:

“The immediate effects include the alteration of several of the laboratory tests used in medical diagnoses. Aggravation of existing liver disease, if present, to the point where jaundice may be seen has also been shown. There is no answer to the query of will permanent liver damage result from the use of the oral contraceptives.”

The honorary Chairman of the Population Crisis Committee, a “pro-pill” organization focused on population control added his two cents about the effects of oral contraceptives on the women using them. “While metabolic alterations affecting the liver and other organs do result from use of the pill, there is no evidence at this time that they pose serious hazards to health;” General William Draper, Page 6705.

Of course, we shouldn’t assume that just because a medication causes a “legion” of biochemical effects on the livers of otherwise healthy women that there will be any lasting problems, right?

Research Since the Hearings

“Women more commonly present with acute liver failure, autoimmune hepatitis, benign liver lesions, primary biliary cirrhosis, and toxin-mediated hepatotoxicity,” according to a 2013 article in Gastroenterology and Hepatology.

Like I mentioned in my piece about rheumatoid arthritis, whenever a health issue affects women disproportionately, there is often a connection with hormonal birth control. While this study doesn’t specifically mention that, it does call for further studies assess the role of sex hormones and other behaviors on liver problems in women.

These connections were well-documented at the 1970 Nelson Pill Hearings but the subsequent research gets more confusing.

Timeline of Liver Research

1980: Lancet published an article showing the connection between malignant liver tumors and women using oral contraceptives.

1989: The British Journal of Cancer found “confirmation in this population of the association between oral contraceptives and hepatocellular carcinoma” and “the relative risk was significantly elevated in long-term users [of oral contraceptives].”

1992: “This study, the largest to date, adds to the number of investigations demonstrating an increased risk of primary liver cancer with use, particularly long-term use, of oral contraceptives.”

2006: “Long-term use of oral contraceptives (OCs) and anabolic androgenic steroids (AASs) can induce both benign (hemangioma, adenoma, and focal nodular hyperplasia [FNH]) and malignant (hepatocellular carcinoma [HCC]) hepatocellular tumors.”

Yet a 2015 meta-analysis concluded that “oral contraceptive use was not positively associated with the risk of liver cancer.” However, the analysis also conceded that “a linear relationship between oral contraceptives use and liver cancer risk was found.” And the authors noted the need for further research into specific formulations of oral contraceptives and the duration of usage.

It makes you wonder how we went from pretty convincing and highly damning connections between oral contraceptives and liver cancer to no positive association at all. Did all the scientists from the 1960s to 2006 get it wrong? Or is something else going on here?

What About the Gallbladder?

Perhaps we can look at the liver’s little buddy, the gallbladder, for some more information. The two are intimately connected in that the liver is constantly making bile and sending it to the gallbladder for storage and dispensation. Like problems with the liver, women are more likely to develop gallstones than men. According to the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, “Extra estrogen can increase cholesterol levels in bile and decrease gallbladder contractions, which may cause gallstones to form. Women may have extra estrogen due to pregnancy, hormone replacement therapy, or birth control pills.”

This was proven shortly after the Nelson Pill Hearings. According to the revised edition of The Doctors’ Case Against The Pill by Barbara Seaman:

“The Pill also has serious adverse effects on the gallbladder, and women who take the Pill face an increased risk of someday facing surgery for gallstones. Pill use causes higher levels of cholesterol saturation in the bile, according to a study reported in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1976. This high level of fate in the bile is considered ‘an early chemical stage of gallstone disease,” according to Dr. Donald Small of the Boston University School of Medicine… The risk of gallbladder disease rises with the length of time a woman has been on the Pill… In some studies, Pill users are two and a half times as likely to suffer from gallstones as comparable women.”

A meta-analysis conducted in 1993 found “Oral contraceptive use is associated with a slightly and transiently increased rate of gallbladder disease” and “Considering…the rapidly changing formulas of oral contraceptives, the authors suggest that the safety of new oral contraceptives be evaluated by studying bile saturation and biliary function rather than by waiting for gallbladder disease to develop.”

A much more recent study (2011) found that there was even more risk of gallbladder disease with the newer formulations:

Long-term use of an oral contraceptive is associated with an increased risk of gallbladder disease compared with no use
There was a small, statistically significant increase in the risk of gallbladder disease associated with the use of desogestrel, drospirenone and norethindrone compared with levonorgestrel
Both estrogen and progesterone have been shown to increase the risk of gallstones
Estrogen has been shown to increase cholesterol production in the liver, with excess amounts precipitating in bile and leading to the formation of gallstones
Progesterone has been shown to decrease gall-bladder motility, which impedes bile flow and leads to gallstone formation

The gallbladder shows us that these hormones are damaging the body.

What Now?

So what do you do when you have a gallbladder that’s not functioning properly? The current practice is to take it out! Of course, removing the gallbladder is not the quick fix many think it is and often leads to other health complications like irritable bowel syndrome, acid reflux, and Sphincter of Oddi Dysfunction.

What about when your liver isn’t functioning properly? That’s not as simple. You can’t just take a liver out. How can the gallbladder, an organ so fundamentally connected to the liver, experience drastic and dangerous changes from hormonal birth control but the liver is supposedly unaffected? Have we researched ourselves out of that problem by declaring that it isn’t a problem? Has there been some spin-doctoring going on when it comes to the liver?

As Dr. Wynn said at the hearings, “There are more than 50 ways in which the metabolic functions of the body are modified, and to say therefore that normal physiological function has been demonstrated in the years of oral contraception is to overlook a very large amount of information.”

I think a very large amount of information has indeed been overlooked.

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More people than ever are reading Hormones Matter, a testament to the need for independent voices in health and medicine. We are not funded and accept limited advertising. Unlike many health sites, we don’t force you to purchase a subscription. We believe health information should be open to all. If you read Hormones Matter, like it, please help support it. Contribute now.