Just Don't Do It: The Birth Control Pill

So, I'm going to go out on a limb here and pick another fairly controversial topic to discuss on a monday morning: the birth control pill. I feel like every girl and her mother are on the pill nowadays. Why? Because it's an expedient method to avoid pregnancy, and doctors claims it can solve everything from bad acne to irregular menstrual cycles. Pregnancy aside, why are we not addressing the actual causes of things like acne or menstrual pain rather than just the symptoms? Unnecessary pains or breakouts are generally your body trying to tell you something is up. Why don't doctors ask us to try something like change our diet, try an herbal remedies, or adopt healthier lifestyle? These would actually address the causes than the symptoms. Instead, we are given a contraceptive?

Am I the only one who thinks this is abnormal?

As girls we are now taught that birth control pills are a safe and reliable way to avoid pregnancy. This couldn't be further from the truth. Birth control, as reliable as it may be a contraceptive, is by no means safe. We are putting so many girls on the pill at the most hormonally and biologically vulnerable time of their life. Girls are being put on the pill when their health choices will have the most impact on their bodies for the long-term. They are unknowingly screwing up one of the most important things their body does: hormonal functioning. Your hormones are actually what create your body minute by minute. The pill is specifically designed to artificially alter your natural cycle through the use of chemically-derived hormones... are you really game? Would you say okay if someone tried to change something else about you, like your blood flow?

Why should I be talking about this anyway? Can't I just be making my own personal choices? Thing is, I want everyone to be as optimally heathy as they can, and listening to the drug industry's chatter isn't part of those choices. Girls nowadays have worse PMS, incidents of candida, allergies, and weight problems then they have in human history, while I partially blame diet of course, I also largely blame the Pill.

Some of the symptoms I've known friends to suffer from having gone on the pill have included:

• significant "inexplicable" weight gain
• yeast infections and overgrowth that can easily become chronic and very difficult to cure over time (anyone noticed that every girl seems to have candida nowadays? And yet, girls who have never been on the pill don't really seem to have that problem...)
• formation of cysts, blood clots, chest pains, or blurred vision
• higher blood pressure
• higher risk of breast or liver cancer
• reduced sexual satisfaction, depression, moodiness
• nausea, migraines, vomiting

Again, does this sound like fun? There are a lot of lies is a lot of misinformation out there about how safe the pill is. Given the hard time I've know girls have had trying to both go on and go off, I can't help but think there is something seriously abnormal at work.

Why start in the first place? Being on the pill unnaturally changes your body's cycle. In many ways your asking your hormones to act otherwise than they normally would. In fact, you are flooding your body with synthetic and foreign hormones that you are asking your body to listen to over your own. This is not natural. You are disrupting your body's capacity do to it's own thing. The pill is invasive. It will never be able to understand the unique functioning of each woman's particular internal structuring and balance.

If you need proof, just look at the breakdown below:

On the left you have the chemically derived version of estrogen, and on the right you have what estrogen is naturally made up of. While they look more or less the same, the left version is merely an imitation of the right. When it comes to chemical make-up, even the slightest molecular difference can make a huge difference in outcome, become there are millions of these inside you, not just one. For non-scientists, here is an example, Down Syndrome is "merely" caused by an extra copy of genetic material on your 21st chromosome. Think of how "small" small a thing that may seem, but just one extra or one less of those little lines on that molecular drawing above can have devastating effects. Obviously, the same differences in molecular breakdown can be made between all the synthetic and natural hormones derived for the Pill, including progesterone. Unnatural hormones will make for unnatural results! Your body will process what is unnatural as a toxic invader to your system.

Given all these side effects, if you do plan on having children, also take into account that you are also cultivating a sub-optimal environment in which your future baby will gestate. Even if you "get off the pill," the effects will still be there and that's what your baby will be formed in.

Because you are overriding your systems natural process of ovulation, even the periods you have during aren't wholly natural. They are artificially created by forcing your hormone balance to change (again) by creating fake signals in your body that it's time to release an unfertilized egg, but because of the pill there is no egg... So you're just shedding your uterine wall for nothing by artificial programming. Eew.

There are plenty of healthy ways to have safe sex, and I can't mention all of them but the simplest one is just the use of a condom, isn't it? A lot of these options don't involve taking a pill every day for the foreseeable future. Obviously your choices are you own when it comes to protecting yourself from an unwanted pregnancy, but I think women should seriously be putting more thought into the choices they make when it comes to contraception. A condom is just a condom, but the Pill may have long term consequences for you and your child forever (and it doesn't protect you from STIs)... if anything, please just think about it!