In America, Birth Control controls YOU

A new book makes a startling claim. Birth control pills control you. According to the author, hormones in the pill affect judgment including choice of partners and memory.

Light Your Virtual Prayer Candle For a Loved One

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - The book, "Sweetening the Pill: Or how We Got Hooked on Hormonal Birth Control" by Holly Grigg-Spall claims the pills are a tool for the suppression of women and that their widespread use has significant implications for women and society as a whole.

According to Grigg-Spall, she noticed that after a long period on the pill, she "felt no connection between my self and my body, between my self and the world around me, between my femaleness and myself," as she wrote in her book.

She explained that the pill does a number of things. It changes the way women think, and it serves as a tool of capitalist oppression against women.

As Vice explained in their review, "n a world that bizarrely places women's sexual nature and reproductive capacity in the center of many ideological conflicts-from Sandra Fluke to the back of a bus in India-at first glance it seems odd to argue that the pill actually facilitates oppression. But the author is proposing the idea that oral hormonal contraceptives are actually a tool of a capitalist patriarchy intent on altering and suppressing femininity, and that women's unquestioning acceptance these powerful medications is, at best, an uneducated recalibration of the brain and body, and at worst, an acquiescence to a culture steeped in hatred of the feminine."

Studies on women and birth control also prove that taking the pills affect memory and choice of partner.

In a 2011 study, cited by Vice, hormonal birth control impacted the way women remembered events around them. Women tended to remember feelings and emotional details, rather than facts and circumstances.

If the pill can affect women's thinking in this way, how else is it possibly interfering with a woman's judgment?

Another study revealed that women on the pill tend to prefer partners with lower testosterone levels. This means men who are less masculine, or even other women.

Also, when women quit using the pill, they found their attraction to their partners actually decreased. Such changes in preference and attraction can have lifelong consequences. It can prompt someone to choose as a marriage partner a person they might not normally be attracted to. It could also lead to separation between partners if the woman no longer feels attracted to her husband.

Chemical ingestion has consequences. While the pill may be largely effective in reducing the likelihood of pregnancy, it also has impacts that are not very well understood. Those impacts are not necessarily  beneficial either.

We live in a society that tells women they no longer have to choose carefully or responsibly when it comes to partners and sexual activity because births can be controlled without consequence. We now know our Church fathers and many naysayers were right. There are consequences, and they are significant and bad.

We must refocus our society on natural family planning, abstinence education, marriage, and the need to be receptive to the gift of life when it is bestowed by God.

The alternatives sold by our secular, chemical-dependent society is both risky and wrong.

---

'Help Give every Student and Teacher FREE resources for a world-class Moral Catholic Education'