Keep in mind, this isn’t telling you what to do with your body. It is from the point of view of one person and their experience. Many women and men take birth control for their periods and that’s understandable, nothing wrong with it.
Women have very complex bodies, and that’s undeniable. Besides the crazy complicated anatomy, there are hormones and chemicals that make our inside a catastrophe – somehow, these two are actually even intertwined! And all of it seems to start at puberty, doesn’t it? You turn twelve and your entire body starts chanting ‘Surprise! You’re actually weirder than you thought!’ On top of all that, because men are too fragile I so many ways and will refuse to help us out on not reproducing unless we want to and having safe sex, it’s also up to us to figure those out too, even if we damage ourselves in the process. Say what?!
My point with this? Trying to take care of your reproductive health may actually wreck your organism over and over, especially if you’re one of the 100 million women and women who take contraceptive pills, and I’ll tell you just why.
Among many uses – like contraception –, contraceptive pills are also used for regulating our periods. As a young girl (and nowadays too, really), my period was especially irregular, so my gynecologist found it fitting for me to take those pills along so many other people. A couple of months later, I started having problems. Low blood pressure, nauseas, dizziness and headaches, the whole combo. After another couple of months, I noticed I’d gained almost ten kilos. Once, a paramedic had to call my parents because I almost fainted in school. I went to a specialist in teenagers’ pediatrics and the doctor told me to kill the pills as soon as she found out I was taking them. While they were only a door to low b.p., which felt invited to stay and is still with me all the time, the other symptoms vanished right away.
‘But each body is a body,’ you might say. ‘You having those doesn’t mean I will too.’
Normally, that rule works out for almost everything. In this specific case, though, you’ll have to admit it doesn’t, and the reason is very simple: those pills, taken by, I repeat, a hundred million women, are based on estrogen and progesterone, women’s hormones. How do they work? Well, basically they fool your hypophysis into believing that there is too much of those hormones in your body, so their production isn’t stimulated anymore. Because there are none of them – but your body doesn’t know that –, your ovaries won’t release your monthly ovule, and fecundation won’t be possible. The problem is that, although progesterone and estrogen control your ovulation, it isn’t the only thing they do. All of a woman’s body growth and development is based on those two, too, and, if you mess with them, you’ll be messing with a very complex system.
You should have understood this at ‘fool your body’, but I will say it anyways: if possible, do not take this kind of medicine. There are a hundred other healthier ways to avoid reproduction, and you should use them instead if you can. Homeopathy, condoms and stuff exist for a reason! Sure, those pills have a 98% efficiency, but are you sure they are worth so many side effects? If you aren’t, I’ll tell you: they are not. Our bodies have a rhythm and a beat for processes within it, and interfering in those never works out too well.
I remember that, when the news that contraceptive for men weren’t being released by the pharmacies here in Brazil because there were too many side effects, I was infuriated. As women, we go through so much with those contraceptives and men got away with it without even thinking. While I do not think men should take hormones, I also don’t think women should, and I was really mad at how everyone could see the harm hormones would do to men but still refuse to see all it does to women. It’s absurd that this kind of medicine is even an option, and anyone informed on what it can do to your body besides what you want it to do will tell you that. For real, there are so many ways to avoid getting pregnant, guys. Do we really have to pick the one that does us the most harm?
