Gyno-mania: The medical betrayal of women

When the birth control pill first came into the lives of American women, and, yes, men, during the early 1960s, it was heralded as a safe, revolutionary, foolproof way to prevent conception — a boon to family planning. It freed women, married or single, from the possibility of unwanted pregnancy, allowing them to choose when and if they would become mothers.

In the ideology of the era, among freethinking individuals, this was a good thing. For far too long, so the theory went, women had pregnancy thrust upon them, ready or not.

Back then, doctors never mentioned aloud the early pill’s potential disastrous side effects: blood clots, heart attacks, stroke. At least, my doctor didn’t. This was the Patriarchy speaking: Take your medicine; it’s good for you!

Yes, I was one of millions upon millions of American women given the birth control pill. My gynecologist prescribed oral contraceptives, assuring me they were absolutely safe and more effective than condoms, which would break, or the diaphragm, which was also iffy. My gynecologist knew I was married, and we didn’t want children. I wasn’t using The Pill to “bed-hop” — I was a wife, in a serious, sustained, loving, monogamous relationship with my husband, who also happened to have been my first lover.

I was taking The Pill innocent that it could lead to anything bad.

Actually, I had still been a virgin after college, at 22, when I met the man I would eventually wed, and why not? Though I wasn’t Catholic, as a teen-ager in Jersey I wanted to be, since I knew from parental interdiction that unfettered, illicit, unsanctioned sex was surely a sin and the path to permanent perdition. My actual background was far less fascinating: I’m a small-town girl, a former supermarket cashier, from a family of displaced New Yorkers and European ?migr?s. I had a Bronx Jewish mother verging on clich?d prudery when she instructed me sternly (apparently unlike my gay brother), “Don’t you ever let a man touch you anywhere.”

And so, I believed her. Back then, we just followed orders. Decades later, we would call those things “hang-ups” and see them for the repression it was. Which we worked really hard to unlearn.

Parenthetically, I might observe here, no wonder, before the advent of PC, they used to have those horrid JAP (Jewish American Princess) jokes such as: “How do you stop a JAP from having sex? Marry her.”

But back to The Pill. How naive we women were. Few of us knew its history, its politics, its caveats, or that, according to the FDA’s Sharon Snyder’s 1990 piece,
“The Pill: 30 Years of Safety Concerns,”

It was 1950 when Dr. Gregory Pincus, an American biologist, was invited by the Planned Parenthood Federation of America to develop an ideal
contraceptive–one that Planned Parenthood stipulated would be “harmless, entirely reliable, simple, practical, universally applicable and aesthetically satisfactory to both husband and wife.”

Planned Parenthood donated $2,100 to the project. Another $20,000 to $30,000 had to be raised from government and private sources before research could get under way.

Within a few years, an oral contraceptive was being clinically tested in 6,000 women in Puerto Rico and Haiti.

Conventional wisdom — a.k.a. pharmaceutically induced propaganda — of that era maintained that The Pill actually had health benefits besides regulating menstrual cycles, among them allegedly protecting women against various forms of cancer, and therefore taking it was a sacrament, or at least a vitamin. If you’ve seen those manipulative, cretinous drug ads pitched to women as if we were feeble-minded, you know what I mean.

Some blame The Pill for producing promiscuity and reducing sex to a handshake. Indeed, one might argue that this medical development revolutionized human behavior, impacted the institution of marriage and courtship, altered mores for the sake of convenience, and gave rise to a massive abortion industry, and these matters merit further detailed consideration.

Actually, in my case, The Pill made me logy, fat, and prone to fall asleep at 7:30 p.m. on the couch in front of the TV next to my husband, who, naturally enough, was not thrilled with my level of interactivity. Alas, I was 20-something and in my prime, but where was my libido? He couldn’t find it. The Pill also made my thick, lush, long dark hair fall out, and maybe even threatened my marriage. In short, The Pill of that era, paradoxically enough, gave me many of the symptoms of the very pregnancy I was seeking to avoid.

When I mentioned these disturbing developments to my gynecologist, he shrugged and blew them off. No matter that my complaints had merit. He was, in the eyes of his other patients, and his own, a Great Man. His bustling, prestigious practice was a marvelously decorated office in a chic Rittenhouse Square high rise called the Medical Tower Building, where he had six examining rooms, each filled with a waiting woman under a white sheet, quaking in terror of the dreaded speculum. And Dr. Deity, let’s call him, rapidly went from room to room, a mere minute or so at a time, to murder a metaphor, like a King Bee fertilizing worker/drones in a honeycombed hive.

I hated The Pill, and I despised going to this doctor. His meter was always running. He had a plane to catch. Dividing himself into six parts, running from room to room, he wasn’t paying sufficient attention to any of the patients, let alone me. Finally, following a symptom-filled decade on The Pill — which I still reacted to despite it having gone through several “new, improved” incarnations with less estrogen and progestin — somehow I mustered up enough courage to defy Dr. Deity. In those days, women rarely questioned their doctors, let alone their gynecologists. If ever women were reduced to one body part, that was it, and to the detriment of both doctor and patient. Anyway, filled with horrible misgivings, nevertheless I quit taking The Pill, deciding its consequences were too dicey. Once again, if I chose to “have sex,” er, make love, I would face conception roulette.

Not until the 1980s, when I was single again, and dating a rogue New Age physician interested in alternative modes of healing, let’s call him Dr. Ty Dye, did I first hear his then-radical observations of apparent causal connections between abortion and breast cancer in women. Simply put, women who had abortions were flooded with hormones surging through the body either from actual pregnancy, or via The Pill. Abortion, he said, rendered a woman’s body, hormonally speaking, “all dressed up with no place to go.”

My apologies, Ty, for thinking your theories were woo-woo. Or perhaps even “A just punishment. Retribution, and in this lifetime,” says health activist Pam Ladds of Philadelphia, speaking ironically. Look, like millions of my sisters, I was brainwashed. Conventional medicine, the Pharmaceutical Corporatocracy, and the mainstream media had conspired to push these pills and
procedures upon us, ethics be damned.

Meanwhile, I will never forget, after querying Dr. Deity one last time about The Pill’s deleterious effects, hearing his succinct and scornful reply:

“You think too much.”