The Greatest Story Never Told
Leslie Carol Botha: The FDA and women’s health in the same sentence makes me nervous. I think it is pretty clear that the FDA does not hold the health of women – nor anyone else for that matter- as a priority. It has become pretty clear that they are the government puppet for the pharmaceutical companies. Dr. Elizabeth Kissling wrote an excellent highlighting some of the FDA’s obvious disregard for the health of women.
Doctors regularly hold women’s birth control prescriptions hostage like this, forcing them to come in for exams that research is increasingly showing are too frequent and often unnecessary and ineffective.
Need proof that women are sometimes desperate for information and support when it comes to quitting hormonal contraception? You need look no further than the 100 plus comments in reply to an old blog posting at Our Bodies Ourselves: Questions About Side Effects of Stopping Contraceptive Injections. The comment stream – a litany of woes concerning women’s discontinuation of Depo-Provera – has been active since Nov. 2, 2009.
Birth-control pills are known to affect women’s taste in men, at least in laboratory experiments. Now a study of real-world couples suggests that this pill-related preference change could have long-term consequences for a relationship’s quality and outcome.
House Republicans, unsure how to proceed, have slowed their efforts to overturn a federal rule requiring employers, including religious institutions, to provide female employees with free health insurance coverage for contraceptives.
Arizona has taken up yet another draconian law for women’s health – this time replicating but broadening the federal push to let employers deny women access to birth control. The bill stipulates that, unless a woman brings in a note proving she is not using it to avoid getting pregnant, an employer can deny birth control to any woman in the workplace.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Join Leslie Carol Botha on Monday, March 19 on KRFC FM when she interviews T.S. Wiley, on her book, ‘Sex Lies and Menopause” and her work and research on Rhythmic Cyclic BHRT and the Wiley Protocol using natural cyclic hormones for menopause. Wiley has made numerous national radio and television appearances and since 2000 continues to present and lecture on Multi-Phasic, Rhythmic Cyclic BHRT and Hibernation and Metabolic States. Wiley’s Seminar’s on the Natural History of Endocrinology are attended by physicians from all over the world and they are awarded CME credits for her work.
The image of a table of men—primarily from religious organizations— comprising a hearing devoted to birth control, became a snapshot emblematic of problems to follow. Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) asked the obvious question when she inquired incredulously, “Where are the women?”
Attempts by Sandra Fluke, a college student that had hoped to speak about the wide role of birth control medicine in women’s health, had been rebuffed with the statement that she wasn’t “qualified to testify.” She has since been publicly vilified by Rush Limbaugh.
In response to Rick Santorum’s recent assertion that birth control only costs “a few dollars” and therefore there shouldn’t be such a big fuss about denying insurance coverage, Mother Jones published a birth control calculator this week that estimates your lifetime costs for birth control, based on your current age. The calculator asks you to enter your age and then select your preferred method. Options include the pill, IUDs, Implanon, injections, the patch, the vaginal ring, and surgical sterilization. (It doesn’t specify sterilization for women or for men, but given the context of the current debates, I’m assuming the calculator estimates only the cost of female sterilization.) It also fails to take into account that, in reality, most women use more than one method throughout their reproductive years.
Ninety-nine percent of women have used contraception, but that hasn’t stopped far-right critics of the rule from trying to turn birth control into a controversy, one that has intensified in the past week. No one has spun the issue better than Georgia Representative Tom Price, who claimed that no woman has ever been denied access to birth control because she could not afford it. “Bring me one woman who has been left behind. Bring me one. There’s not one,” Price told ThinkProgress when it asked how low-income women could access contraception if it were not insured
Follow Us!