A
Season to Bleed
Chemically
altering women’s bodies and mentally altering perceptions of “normal”
By Lizbeth
Finn-Arnold
I’ll
be the first one to admit that getting my monthly period
is a veritable pain in the you-know-what. It always seems to
come at the least convenient time, and brings with it unwelcome
cramps, headaches, fatigue, bloating, and the blues. As busy
women, competing in a man’s world, with no time to slow
down, our periods are generally unwanted intrusions. As distracted
moms, our periods are just one more inconvenience. Face it, there
is no good time to bleed.
So you would think that
I would be ecstatic to learn that in September 2003, the Food and
Drug Administration approved a drug that for all intents and purposes,
may abolish monthly bleeding from our lives. But I’m not.
In fact, I find it appalling that U.S. pharmaceutical companies
can brazenly promote the chemical alteration of our female bodies
for profit, with very little opposition or public discussion. Instead,
they promise a pill that will “liberate us”; yet completely
ignore the way this magical pill can negatively impact our cultural
perceptions of what is normal, natural, and acceptable for women’s
bodies.
Produced by Barr Laboratories,
Inc., in Woodcliff, New Jersey, “Seasonale®” is
being marketed as the first “extended-cycle birth control
pill.” According to a company press release, “The Seasonale
regimen is designed to reduce the number of periods from 13 to
4 per year. Seasonale is a 91 day regimen taken daily as 84 active
tablets of 0.15 mg of levonorgestrel/0.03 mg of ethinyl estradiol,
followed by 7 inactive tablets.” As a result, women will
no longer have lunar cycles; but find themselves with four “seasonal
cycles” of bleeding.
According to WebMD
Medical News, Dr. Paul Norris, a professor of obstetrics/gynecology
at the University of Miami School of Medicine stated that “This
probably is the first step of a progression towards yearly ....periods,
maybe longer.”
Seasonale® is touted
as being especially beneficial to women who suffer from severe
premenstrual symptoms. “It’s definitely not for everyone,” Norris
continued. “But for women who have cyclic problems, who are
anemic, have symptomatic fibroids, and for women who are very active
and just don’t want to be bothered by periods, it’s
good news.”
And good news for Barr
Laboratories, a company that stands to make billions of dollars
if they can convince women that their periods are an inconvenience
that they can live without. Seasonale® is Barr’s first
internally developed New Drug Application (NDA) product to gain
FDA approval and therefore is incredibly important to the company
that “currently ranks as the third largest manufacturer and
marketer of oral contraceptive products in the U.S. marketplace.”
Lara Owen, author of Honoring
Menstruation: A Time of Self Renewal (Crossing Press 1998)
has serious reservations about Seasonale®. She states, “While
this drug may perhaps prove useful for some women with serious
menstrual pathology, for healthy women it sounds potentially
disastrous. Monthly menstruation has a variety of positive effects
on the body/mind: it is a crucial element in the continuous ebb
and flow of hormones central to overall health in women up till
the time of menopause. It is also part of a concurrent emotional
cycle in which a woman gains in maturity and self-knowledge through
staying current with her feelings. To suppress this cycle puts
at risk both physical health and psychological well being.”
The National Women’s
Health Network, a network that serves as a watchdog over the regulation
of drugs and devices that are marketed, prescribed and sold to
women, also has reservations. While supporting the availability
of Seasonale® as a contraceptive option, the network conveys
concern about the methods in which the drug is already being discussed
in the medical community. Their statement reads: “If menstrual
suppression is presented as the preferred option, it will stigmatize
menstruation and may raise unsupported and inaccurate worries about
their periods among women who prefer the monthly cycle.” The
network warns that the medical community should “avoid exaggerating
the medical need or overstating the health benefits.”
Barr indicates that it
plans to market Seasonale® directly to physicians and healthcare
professionals, rather than consumers. But it appears as if Barr
is already preparing a receptive marketplace for its product. Barr
provides a “Know Your Period” educational website,
which is described as being “sponsored by leading female
women’s health experts,” and “designed to educate
and inform women about important health and lifestyle issues related
to menstrual periods.” The site, while informative with many
links to various women’s health sites, is in fact solely
sponsored by Barr Laboratories. However, the Barr company logo
and name only appear on the “About Us” page.
The site, though, is not
completely without an agenda. While it never openly mentions or
directly promotes Seasonale® , the site sets the “groundwork” for
its marketing campaign. On the “Menstrual Myth & Facts” page,
the first “fact” declares that “Monthly periods
are normal, but not necessarily necessary,” and continues
to say that “there is no medical reason to maintaining the
monthly period associated with oral contraceptives.”
But some, like Sheryl
Paul, M.A., wholeheartedly disagree with Barr and the belief that
monthly periods are not necessary. Ms. Paul, a counselor in California,
and the author of The Conscious Bride (New Harbinger Publications,
Inc. 2000) has closely studied rites of passage. She says, “There
is often great wisdom and important information in the symptoms
that emerge during each phase of woman’s cycle—from
ovulation to the premenstrual phase to bleeding itself. These symptoms
are one of the ways our bodies are attempting to communicate with
us, and when we learn to decode the messages we are often rewarded
with the boons of creativity, insight, and compassion. A woman’s
menstrual cycle is her wisdom. It’s her gateway into womanhood.
It’s her direct connection to the mystery of life, death,
and rebirth.” |
