Walter Lord wrote in “The Good Years: From 1900 to the First World War” that “rules were simple — nice people didn’t mention sex, and even smoking was questionable.”
Now, 100 years later, in Obama’s America, we’re talking about it incessantly — powers that be essentially sanctifying unfettered sex that contraceptives make possible.
If you don’t accept this, you’re a medieval prude. And, employers who cannot in good conscience fund it — fuhgeddaboudit! Pope Benedict XVI recently proclaimed such talk “unjust ridicule.”
Even the late Dr. Luigi Mastroianni, a pioneering reproductive endocrinologist, closely allied with “Father of Birth Control” Dr. John Rock, agreed.
Twenty years ago in March 1992, I had lunch with him during a conference on birth control at the National Institutes of Health. Health authorities were trying to figure out how to convince more women to use it. Theirs was an uphill battle given unhealthy side effects. Understandably, only about 50 percent of women were consistent contraceptors.
Mastroianni was surprised when I told him my preferred method was “no.” And, I was surprised when he affirmed me, saying I was practicing birth control by waiting until marriage.
Artificial birth control makes pharmaceutical companies a bundle, whereas self-control preserves the family, and, thereby, the culture. Self-control also preserves health.
While first-generation Enovid, with 10 times the estrogen needed, caused thousands of women to die or be maimed by stroke, current contraceptives nearly double stroke risk.
The once-a-month NuvaRing is fighting 730 lawsuits filed in state and federal courts. The first, filed in 2008, alleges NuvaRing led to death by stroke after the company hid the risks.
Likewise, Yaz, the Yasmin/Yaz Lawsuit Center reports, is linked to “blood clots including pulmonary embolism, DVT (deep vein thrombosis) and stroke.”
And, the Ortho Evra patch, releasing 60 percent more estrogen and progestin than typical, has caused, it’s believed, 23 deaths, prompting a massive campaign for its recall.
According to National Cancer Institute, the pill is linked, as well, to an elevated risk of breast cancer. An NCI-sponsored study published in 2003 concluded “the risk was highest for women who used oral contraceptives within five years prior to diagnosis.”
Increased incidence of sexually transmitted disease is likewise a serious concern.
The prevalence of hormonal contraceptive use in spite of these and other risks harkens back to the time when cigarettes were equally popular and glamorized in film, with nary a care for the health consequences.
By the ’60s, their deleterious effects apparent, Surgeon General Luther Terry started his crusade.
It was on June 1962 — almost 50 years ago — that Terry “announced,” according to NIH, “that he would convene a committee of experts to conduct a comprehensive review of the scientific literature on the smoking question. … Meeting at the National Library of Medicine (at NIH) … from November 1962 through January 1964, the committee reviewed more than 7,000 scientific articles with the help of over 150 consultants.”
In January 1964, Terry issued the commission’s report on a Saturday — “to minimize the effect on the stock market and to maximize coverage in the Sunday papers.”
Two decades later, Terry recalled how the report “hit the country like a bombshell. It was front page news and a lead story on every radio and television station in the United States and many abroad.”
Smoking and Health: Report of the Advisory Committee to the Surgeon General “held cigarette smoking responsible for a 70 percent increase in the mortality rate of smokers over non-smokers.”
One day, just maybe we’ll have the courage to conduct a systematic review of the scientific literature vis-?-vis contraceptives, just as Terry did for red-flag raising cigarettes.
And, who knows, maybe we’ll realize the “good years” were good for a reason.
Mary Claire Kendall is a Washington-based writer. She served as special assistant to the assistant secretary for health, in the Department of Health and Human Services, from 1989 to 1993.
