“Hormone-free” is a food label trending in American sales, as people look for meat and dairy products that have not been manipulated. In fact, Nielsen reports that sales growth for labels like natural, antibiotic-free, and hormone-free are outpacing conventional meat sales as people choose products that seem healthier and more natural. Marketing experts note that frozen food sales also have been exploding among millennials looking for healthy choices, with 76 percent of those shoppers saying they picked their food buys because having hormone-free items was important to them.
It’s time for those same shoppers to consider whether being hormone-free would be a good choice when it comes to birth control too. It’s at least worth a conversation.
This week, a study from researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago reported that more than one-third of adults in America are taking prescription medicines that have depression and risk of suicide as side effects. More than 200 commonly used drugs — including hormonal birth control — had mood-altering properties, which is significant when you consider both the widespread nature of the drug use and the reality that suicide has been on the increase.
Dima Qato, assistant professor of pharmacy systems, outcomes, and policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago, was the lead author of the study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
“With depression as one of the leading causes of disability and increasing national suicide rates, we need to think innovatively about depression as a public health issue, and this study provides evidence that patterns of medication use should be considered in strategies that seek to eliminate, reduce or minimize the impact of depression in our daily lives,” she said in media reports.
Case in point: the side effects of the birth control pill.
This isn’t the only study looking at hormonal birth control as a risk factor for women. A 2017 study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry tracked women in Denmark for eight years, comparing those who took birth control with those who did not, to study the suicide risk the drugs posed. What they learned was that the risk of attempting suicide was almost twice as high for women on the hormones, and that women actually committed suicide at more than three times the rate. And both of these studies concurred with a Danish study that found hormonal birth control was linked to high rates of depression.
Writing for Harvard Health Publishing in a piece titled “Can hormonal birth control trigger depression?”, Dr. Monique Tello noted, “Over the years, more than a few patients in my women’s health practice have told me that their hormonal birth control — the pill, patch, ring, implant, injection, or IUD — made them feel depressed. And it’s not just my patients: several of my friends have felt the same way.” She’s right. Still, without much conversation, many women spend years consuming hormones without any knowledge of how those hormones are impacting them.
The abortion industry think tank the Guttmacher Institute reports that with an average desired family size of two children, “a woman must use contraceptives for roughly three decades,” further noting that “sixty-seven percent of women who practice contraception currently use nonpermanent methods, primarily hormonal methods (the pill, patch, implant, injectable and vaginal ring), IUDs and condoms.”
That’s a lot of women living much of their adult lives on pills and artificial hormonal products — healthy women whose bodies can function beautifully without the manipulation of birth control.
As I travel across the country as the head of an organization which has more than 1,200 chapters on college and university campuses, I find that the topic of contraception is one that has many women curious. More and more women are reporting that using hormonal birth control is a choice they just won’t make … and it has nothing to do with religion.
A pro-life Protestant friend of mine is a case in point. Her faith didn’t prohibit a choice for some birth control. But it was the deadening feelings she had on the drugs themselves — like constantly feeling as though she was poisoned on the day before a menstrual cycle, or under the influence of a harsh cold medicine — that convinced her to go hormone-free.
At naturalwomanhood.org, women described how they felt like new and different people when they decided to walk away from daily hormones. One woman said, “That is how I would describe coming off the Pill — an awakening.”
Like many people, I spend a lot of time thinking about the food I eat and serve to my husband and children. If I wouldn’t serve meat or milk pumped up with hormones to my family, why would I drug myself? It’s time for a conversation before too many women learn the hard way about long-time exposure to hormonal manipulation.
Kristan Hawkins, @KristanHawkins, is president of Students for Life of America, which serves more than 1,200 chapters on college and high school campuses in all 50 states.
