It happens every time you open a bottle of cough syrup: a very long piece of paper folded dozens of times and covered with very small words flutters to the ground. It lists all the dosages, side effects, contraindications, and problems associated with the drug you are about to consume. Have you ever wondered how that little piece of paper came to be there?
The Women are Disposable
Dozens of years ago, back in 1960, a radical feminist, a supporter of legal abortion and a woman’s right to control her own body, was given a new medication as she lay in the hospital following the birth of her first child. The medication was Enovid, and it was the first oral contraceptive on the US market.
This feminist, Barbara Seaman, discovered that the contraceptive her obstetrician was trying to shovel into her posed a major health threat. Within a year, the pharmaceutical company G.D. Searle, the manufacturer of the drug, had in its secret files 132 reports of thrombosis and embolism and eleven reported deaths. How many women were injured and killed without ever being reported in the medical system is, to this day, not known.
Though the medical literature had scattered reports of the problem, nobody wanted to talk about it. The Nobel Laureate Frederick Robbins told the American Association of Medical Colleges “the dangers of overpopulation are so great that we may have to use certain techniques of conception control that may entail considerable risk to the individual woman.”
The FDA acknowledged that the drug was hazardous, but refused to pull it from the shelves, and eventually pulled even the acknowledgement of its hazards. The women using it didn’t realize that the manufacturer had watched women die during the drug trials, or that they knew it caused deaths after its release.
It took nearly a decade for Seaman to gather sufficient evidence about the side effects of the birth control pill to write one of the most famous books in the history of contraception, The Doctors’ Case Against the Pill. The book used medical reports to document the enormous health hazards posed by the contraceptive pill. Both the drug companies and Planned Parenthood tried to stop its publication. As a direct result of this book, a Congressional committee convened to investigate. The committee ordered drug companies to include warning information with oral contraceptives, and all other drugs they produced. That’s why we get those little pieces of paper in our cough syrup boxes — because oral contraceptives have a history of killing women.
The Poor are Disposable
Eventually, all high-dose birth control pills were pulled from the market to avoid the lawsuits. But even the second-and third-generation low-dose contraceptive pills remain hazardous. The FDA itself admits women on estrogen and progestin are at increased risk for “getting blood clots, heart attacks, strokes, breast cancer, and gall bladder disease. For a woman with a uterus, estrogen increases her chance of getting endometrial cancer (cancer of the uterine lining).” The FDA also admits that these hormones increase the risk of dementia.
The first oral contraceptives were tested in the 1950s on Puerto Rican women who were too poor and uneducated to afford lawyers. As already noted, several died during the tests. But Puerto Ricans eventually got more educated and got lawyers. Oddly enough, the drug companies moved their field tests at about the same time.
The British Broadcasting Commission released a documentary in 1995) asserting that Norplant trials had likewise maimed and killed hundreds of women in Bangladesh and Haiti, the poorest countries in the world. Haiti alone is so unstable that it had 14 coups d'état and 8 changes of government in the ten years leading up the BBC report.
Through USAID, our government helped the drug companies fund these drug studies on the poorest of the poor in Third World countries, countries with little capacity for medical oversight and a large need for the U.S. economic assistance they received. Like the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, in which Alabama doctors knowingly refused to treat poor syphilitic black men from the 1950s through the 1970s in order to gather data on how third-stage syphilis kills people, the Norplant trials on poor black women produced great data. Based on these trial results, the FDA approved the drug for use on U.S. women in 1990.
By 1998 the US manufacturer of Norplant was being sued by over 53,000 women. The numerous class action lawsuits asserted a host of minor health problems, such as increased abnormal hair growth, decreased libido, vomiting and weight gain and a host of significant health risks, such as menstrual irregularities (including complete loss of fertility), strokes and blindness. Fortunately for the drug company, a sympathetic Texas judge dismissed the remaining cases in 1999, after the company settled with most of the plaintiffs for $1500 each.
Now Teenagers are Disposable, Too
Well, it’s the morning after in America. Now Plan B, the new morning-after pill, is the hot new contraceptive. It is argued that Plan B will reduce the number of abortions. No one has bothered to mention that countries like England, where the equivalent of Plan B has been available as an over-the-counter drug for two years, has exactly the same abortion rate it has always had, nor that its rate of sexually transmitted disease among teenagers has suddenly skyrocketed.
Instead, we discover the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, one of the same groups who tried to shovel Enovid into Barbara Seaman back in 1960, supports over-the-counter sales of the high-dose birth control pill Plan B. Keep in mind that Plan B provides a progestin dose fifty times higher than the daily dose in the minipill. True, this is an improvement over Preven, the other morning-after contraceptive. Preven has an estrogen dose 2500 times higher than the daily dose in the original birth control pill, the pill which brought Congressional scrutiny and was pulled from the market because it killed too many women. So, with FDA approval, any woman in the country will be able to self-medicate as often as she wants with a fifty-fold increased dose of progestin, a drug that would require a doctor’s prescription if only it were fifty times weaker. Even better, a man could buy it for her and make sure she gets it. If he’s feeling generous, he might even tell her what he slipped into her cola.
There’s really nothing to worry about. After all, the experts recommending this drug for over-the-counter sales work with drug companies and the government. They’re here to help. So, remember ladies, no matter what it may look like, what the gentleman did to you the night before bears no resemblance to what the drug companies will do to you the morning after.
© Copyright 2004 Catholic Exchange
Steve Kellmeyer is a nationally known author and lecturer, specializing in apologetics and catechetics. His new book on the Theology of the Body, Sex and the Sacred City is now available for on-line or phone ordering through Bridegroom Press as are his other books, audio recordings and teaching tools. If you would like to comment on his columns or other writings, please visit www.skellmeyer.blogspot.com .
