Washington, D.C. (6/8/2009) -- Birth control pills are not getting safer—they are merely getting less dangerous. Aggressively promoted and advertised, birth control and preventative contraceptives have blossomed into a rapidly developing industry that is having a major influence on the American public.
According to the American Life League (ALL), over 80 percent of women in the United States have been on the pill at some point in their lives. The ALL, along with a minority of medical professionals in the field of Napro-technology (natural gynecology) believe that the pill is slowly killing them.
This horror movie-like saga was the scenario portrayed by Dr. Lynn Kerr, one of the panelists who spoke about the damaging effects of birth control pills on women’s health at a press conference held on Thursday at the National Press Club.
Dr. Kerr, an Associate Clinical Professor at UCSF/Fresno Internal Medicine Residency Program said that she strives to teach her students an alternative viewpoint to the status quo, which tells doctors that birth control pills are the safe and easy, “quick-fix” to an array of medical issues.
When females go to the doctor to be treated for issues such as disabling periods (dysmenorrhea), lack of menstruation, secondary amenorrhea, loss of periods, and ovarian cysts, doctors are often quick to write a prescription for one of the many up-and-coming birth control pills and then send patients on their way. Because the prescription does help relieve condition symptoms, patients believe that they are “cured” from their ailment, as long as they remain on the drug.
“The birth control pill is not truly a treatment for those problems,” said Dr. Paul Carpentier, first vice president of the American Academy of Fertility Care Professionals. “It (the pill) floods the body with such artificial hormones that the body can no longer function in normal ways.”
Dr. Carpentier practices family medicine at the Heywood Hospital in Gardner, Massachusetts, where he says that he refuses to prescribe the pill to females. Instead, Dr. Carpentier chooses to find alternative treatments for his patients. These treatments, unconventional in the modern era, include simple lifestyle adjustments such as diet changes, therapeutic healing, and charting menstruation cycles. This last option is a strategy that synchs the female menstruation cycle with specific pain medications, in order to pinpoint treatment at the climax of discomfort.
Dr. Carpentier claimed that birth control pills shut off normal processes, which in a way, is like putting a Band Aid over a festering wound. It doesn’t fix the problem; it just masks the issue and allows it to get worse.
Jim Sedlak, vice president of the American Life League acted as the mediator during the panel, inserting brief remarks that easily gave away his bias. He was adamant that young teenage girls have access to birth control through clinics such as Planned Parenthood.
Sedlak said that this access is dangerous not only because it sends the message to 13, 14, and 15 year-old teens that it’s ok to be sexually active, but also for medical reasons. He said that young girls are not always aware of their medical history and, therefore, they might not know of a family history that could be counter-indicative to birth control pills and cause fatal consequences.
With healthcare recently taking center stage in politics, there is a push for government funding of family planning programs. Whether this funding includes alternative programs (such as Napro-technology) is still up for debate. Sedlak, however, thinks that there is no reason that federal funding shouldn’t provide patients with all of the alternative treatments.
Educating women on natural family planning is cost-efficient in an economy that is forcing Americans to save money whenever and wherever they can. According to Sedlak, the amount of money it cots for one woman to take birth control for six months could be used, instead, to pay a teacher to educate a whole group of female medical students about natural family planning options for the duration of a college semester.
Title 10 already provides 300 million dollars to support health care, but the Obama Administration wants to increase this number to 700 million. Planned Parenthood alone is asking the Obama Administration for a total of 4.6 billion dollars to further its own incentives. The ALL hopes that this money won’t be funneled straight into Planned Parenthood, but will be used more wisely: supporting programs that are more cost efficient and that “really work.” That’s what it’s all about.