The results have raised hopes that people could one day take "the pill" without suffering as many side effects.

Hormones in oral contraceptives work to avoid pregnancy in a few ways.

They suppress ovaries from releasing an egg each month, thin the lining of the uterus to make it less likely for a fertilised egg to implant itself and thicken mucus to make it harder for sperm to enter the uterus.

But, as many people who have taken the pill before already know, oral contraceptives can also come with side effects and increased risks like blood clots.

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The comparison was intended to reassure women of the vaccine's safety.

Instead, it has stoked anger in some quarters — not about the pause, but about the fact that most contraceptives available to women are hundreds of times riskier, and yet safer alternatives are not in sight.

The clots linked to the vaccine were a dangerous type in the brain, while birth control pills increase the chances of a blood clot in the leg or lung — a point quickly noted by many experts.

But the distinction made little difference to some women.

"Where was everyone's concern for blood clots when we started putting 14-year-old girls on the pill," one woman wrote on Twitter.

Another said, "If birth control was made for men it'd taste like bacon and be free."

Some women heard, on social media and elsewhere, that they should not complain because they had chosen to take birth control knowing the risks involved.

"That just made me double down," said Mia Brett, an expert in legal history focused on race and sexuality.

"This is such a common response to women's health care — that we point out something and it's dismissed."

The torrent of fury online was familiar to experts in women's health.

"They should be angry — women's health just does not get equal attention," said Dr. Eve Feinberg, a reproductive endocrinologist and infertility specialist at Northwestern University.

"There's a huge sex bias in all of medicine."

Dr. Feinberg and many of the women online acknowledge that contraceptives have given women control over their fertility, and the benefits far exceed the harms. Rebecca Fishbein, a 31-year-old culture writer, started tweeting about the inadequacy of birth control pills almost immediately after the announcement of the pause.

Still, "birth control is an incredible invention, thank God we have it," she said last month in an interview. "I'll fight anyone who tried to take it away."

Contraceptives have also improved over the years, with intrauterine devices and oral options that offer an ultralow dose of estrogen.

"Overall, it's incredibly safe," Dr. Feinberg said.

"Everything that we do has risks."

But Dr. Feinberg said it was crucial for health care providers to discuss the risks with their patients and coach them on worrisome symptoms — a conversation many women said they had never had. Continue reading

• Image: www.carolinaheartandleg.com

One offers to track my ovulation and get me pregnant.

The other offers to do the same, but promising I won't find myself in the family way.

The latter seems to be winning the war, with quirky gifs and videos showing young women waking up and gleefully taking their temperature, inputting digits into their colourful app, and being told they can throw barrier contraception to the wind that day.

It's sold as being hyper-scientific, with the founders and developers formerly working at Cern, and "without a single side-effect": unless, of course you count unintended pregnancy as a side-effect.

The novelist Olivia Sudjic, writing for the Guardian, revealed her shock at getting pregnant within months of starting to use the Natural Cycles app, and found many other women had too.

In bare bones, the app is simply the Vatican-favoured rhythm method repackaged in shiny, Silicon Valley jargon and a slick interface.

And the rhythm method doesn't have the greatest reputation as a diecast means of preventing pregnancy: the Catholic church recommend it for married couples both trying to plan and delay pregnancy, but with the very clear message that couples employing it should be open to the possibility of new life.

Happy accidents can bring as much joy as planned babies - as a Catholic, I back the church's teaching that sex is about far more than pleasure, and also comes with responsibility and consequences for you and your family.

I could use the app to try to avoid pregnancy but would have to accept pregnancy as a possible outcome of any bedroom antics.

But other women are perfectly entitled to want a contraceptive less prone to chance and failure, and deserve the truth about the app sold as super accurate.

It's unreliable because our bodies are unreliable: fertility waxes and wanes with an assortment of biological factors, and tracking ovulation is never an exact science.

It's this fact that makes the marketing behind Natural Cycles so insidious: the science is pushed hard even though the founders are physicists, not gynaecologists.

I'd no more listen to a physicist's advice on my fertility than I would let a mechanic cut my hair.

To use the app correctly, women must record their temperature at the same time each morning, immediately upon waking, before sitting up.

Many things can throw off the accuracy: oversleeping, having a fever, being hung over, insomnia, taking your temperature shortly after waking, irregular periods and polycystic ovary syndrome.

According to these criteria I couldn't have recorded a single day accurately in the last week - I've had heat-induced insomnia, slept late, woken early, had a mild hangover, and woke one morning with a slight fever.

Trying to remember all of these conditions, when the app's marketing tells you it is reliable, gives some clue as to the reason why so many women are unhappy.

But it's not surprising that promises of natural birth control are so alluring.

The side-effects of most forms of contraception are maddening.

Friends on the pill have had their weight explode, their mental health suffer, and their skin return to teenage form, with migraines drastically worsened by daily hormones. Continue reading

• Dawn Foster is a Guardian columnist who writes on politics, social affairs and economics
• Image: Inside Housing

But on Sunday, Washington University scientists at the annual Endocrine conference ​hailed early trials which showed that a once-daily tablet that lowers sperm production seemed safe and effective in preventing pregnancy.

The trouble is, in the time it's taken to develop a male hormonal pill, attitudes to contraception, particularly among thirtysomethings, have moved on, with swathes of women abandoning the pill and hormonal coil for condoms or contraceptive apps.

The future of reproductive health is part digital, part hi-tech latex, but not hormonal.

Suddenly this much-longed-for solution may already be obsolete.

The history of the contraceptive pill is fraught - fraught with a thousand examples of women who took charge of their reproductive destiny at the cost of their physical and mental wellbeing.

As Julie Burchill once put it: "The freedom that women were supposed to have found in the 1960s largely boiled down to easy contraception and abortion; things to make life easier for men, in fact."

Despite the touted liberties of the female pill, many feminists fantasised about the male equivalent as a matter of biological and social justice.

But given the many miserable side-effects for women of hormonal contraception - everything from lack of concentration to severe depression - the appetite for a male drug is weak.

Even the Male Contraceptive Initiative estimates it at under 50%.

Even though the Washington scientists conducting the trial of 100 men aged 18-50 say that dimethandrolone undecanoate - the drug's chemical name - had no pernicious side-effects, long-term trials are now needed to gauge the effects for a far larger sample of the male population. And the finished product is still a long way from market.

Even when the long-term trials are complete, female contraceptive scientists such as Herjan Coelingh Bennink believe that big pharma is currently run by too many resistant middle-aged men, who will take some persuading to manufacture and sell it.

It may be high time that men stepped up to the plate when it came to taking more contraceptive responsibility, but in the meantime women have already come up with a better solution for themselves.

Case in point - Elina Berglund, a former Cern physicist who gave up her work on the Large Hadron Collider to create the Natural Cycles app, which prevents or helps plan a pregnancy by having the user take their basal temperature each day and input the number into the app, which then predicts ovulation and fertile v infertile days.

It's already a well-adopted solution: cheaper, safer and more informative than any of its hormonal counterparts - and while it again puts the onus on women rather than men, it seems to be an onus that many women, particularly digital natives, are prepared to bear. Continue reading

• Nichi Hodgson writes about sex and relationships
• Image: Global Dating Insights

But GPs are warning the pill is not safe for all women, and that medical oversight is still needed.

At present, only the emergency morning-after pill can be bought at a pharmacy without a prescription from the patient's doctor.

In May, a Medsafe committee will consider a proposal from Green Cross and consultancy Pharma Projects to change that. Continue reading

AAP reports that deleting two proteins essential for sperm transport has been found to make male mice temporarily infertile .

"Our technique is good because it's not hormonal, so males won't be afraid to take it," Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences senior lecturer Dr Sab Ventura told the Herald Sun. Continue reading

And yet, Ms Grigg-Spall (pictured, right) has so much in common with the pill's diehard champions. Like Ms Fluke, she grew to adulthood thinking that taking this medicine daily was as natural as having toast for breakfast. Like Ms Pelosi and Ms Richards, she thinks contraception is a reproductive right. (No, she is not from what she calls "the religious Right".) But, although once "hooked" on them, she has fallen out of love with synthetic hormones and wants everyone to know why.

In her mid-20s, when she should have been feeling on top of the world, Holly Grigg-Spall was feeling depressed and empty, ho-hum about sex. And that was when she was not feeling anxious and paranoid or erupting into furious arguments with her boyfriend. "I felt I was losing my mind," she says.

She had been on the pill since she was 17, when her mother and family doctor told her it would solve the problem of heavy and painful periods as well as protect her against pregnancy. She did not yet have a boyfriend and would not become sexually active for another four years, but she accepted their view that it was the responsible thing to do. She knew nothing about how the pill worked - other than stopping babies arriving - and did not think to ask. Continue reading

Sources

• Carolyn Moynihan in MercatorNet
• Image: Mail Online

Carolyn Moynihan is a New Zealand journalist with a special interest in family issues and deputy editor of MercatorNet.

Although all common birth control pills increase women's chances of getting blood clots, concerns have recently been mounting about an even higher risk linked to a newer generation of pills that contain the compound drospirenone, such as Bayer AG's popular Yaz and Yasmin.

They also argue, that according to the Church's moral guidelines, religious women are free to take the pill for this purpose.

As reported by the Guardian, the scientists say that it is an established scientific fact that by not having children there is an increased risk in getting cancer because pregnancy, and breastfeeding a baby, reduces the number of ovulatory cycles a woman has in her lifetime.

More ovulatory cycles increases cancer risk.

While increasing the risk of blood clots, the oral contraceptive pill has been shown to reduce the

• overall mortality rates of women who have ever taken it by 12% compared with non-users, and
• risk of developing ovarian and endometrial cancers by 50%-60% in pill users compared with never-users. (Protection that persists for 20 years.)

Writing in the Lancet, Dr Kara Britt from Monash University, Melbourne, and Professor Roger Short from the University of Melbourne say religious women should have the option to take the pill.

"The Catholic church condemns all forms of contraception, as outlined by Pope Paul VI in Humanae Vitae in 1968. Although Humanae Vitae never mentions religious women, they should be free to use the contraceptive pill to protect against the hazards of nulliparity since the document states that 'the church in no way regards as unlawful therapeutic means considered necessary to cure organic diseases, even though they also have a contraceptive effect."

"If the Catholic church could make the contraceptive pill freely available to all its nuns, it would reduce the risk of those accursed pests, cancer of the ovary and uterus, and give nuns' plight the recognition it deserves," they write.

Women who begin their periods at an early age and hit the menopause late are also at a higher risk of mortality from breast, ovarian and uterine cancer.

Sources

• The Guardian
• Image: St Rita

"If we comply, as the law requires, we will be helping our students do things that we teach them, in our classes and in our sacraments, are sinful — sometimes gravely so," Catholic University President John Garvey wrote in The Washington Post. "It seems to us that a proper respect for religious liberty would warrant an exemption for our university and other institutions like it."

But while some insist that the rules, which spring from last year's health law, break new ground, many states as well as federal civil rights law already require most religious employers to cover prescription contraceptives if they provide coverage of other prescription drugs.

While some religious employers take advantage of loopholes or religious exemptions, the fact remains that dozens of Catholic hospitals and universities currently offer contraceptive coverage as part of their health insurance packages.

In the press release, issued on 3 May this year UNFPA Executive Director, Dr. Osotimehin said "the population projections underscore the urgent need to provide safe and effective family planning to the 215 million women who lack it. We must invest the resources to enable women and men to have the means to exercise their human right to determine the number and spacing of their children," he said.

However, according to Safiye Cagar, director of the information and external relations division at UNFPA, the Catholic Church's ban on the use of contraception is not to blame for the population boom because most Catholics ignore it.

"In Catholic countries like Italy, Spain or Malta people are still using contraceptives like condoms, so the Church ban is not having an impact.

"Besides, the population growth in Catholic countries is limited compared to other parts of world," said Cagar.

Quoting from a report by the Guttmacher Institute, (a nonprofit sexual health research organization, which some have called the research arm of Planned Parenthood), he said that 98 percent of sexually active Catholic women have used contraceptive methods banned by the church, according to a recent survey.

The 7 billionth human being is also "symbolic". There could be several of them, born, it seems, in carefully designated places in the world, where it is considered useful to draw the population's attention the fact that the Human population never grown with such speed before the 20th century; for example the Philippines.

It is a less well know fact is that it is never again likely to grow with such speed. The global fertility rate is already decreasing; in the future the population of the world is likely to decline

How many is too many?

There is a debate about how many people the earth can sustain. With both more people and longer lifetimes, humanity's absolute numbers continue to rise, even though the number of children per women has halved since 1950. The absolute growth rate in human population peaked at 2.1 percent between 1965 and 1970, according demographer Joel Cohen of Columbia University's Earth Institute to Cohen. "We're now down to 1.1 percent per year," although that still means roughly 150 babies born every minute.

While the fertility rate is one of the factors putting pressure on the earth's resources some say the real issue is the often unchecked, unmitigated, uncontrollable, and unbridled consumption. In the time it took the population to double, "the economy grew by 15 times, cars by 16 times and fertilizer-use by sixfold." A Scientific American article highlights the role of consumerism.

• The world's richest 500 million people produce half the world's carbon dioxide emissions—the primary greenhouse gas responsible for climate change—whereas the poorest three billion emit just seven percent.
• The average American—one of 312.5 million—uses up some 88 kilograms of stuff daily: food, water, plastics, metals and other material goods.
• Americans consume a full 25 percent of the world's energy despite representing just 5 percent of global population
• The band of industrialized nations combine to waste 222 million metric tons of food per year, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

You are one in 7 billion. What's your number? Click here and then enter your birthday to find your number and compare yourself to family, friends, and others around the globe.

Source

• Reuters
• The Scientific American - Growth rate has Peaked
• The Scientific American - How many people can the earth support?
• Image: www.salon.com

A friend with polycystic ovarian syndrome whom I will call "Michelle" had been prescribed the pill since she was 16 years old. Not only was it unnecessary, but the contraceptives exacerbated more severe health problems. Having struggled for many years with debilitating depression, Michelle went to a psychiatrist who advised her to get off the pill immediately.

When Michelle went back to her gynaecologist to inform the doctor of her suicidal tendencies, her ob-gyn sighed with frustration. "How suicidal?" she asked.

That was enough for Michelle, and she stopped taking the pill. Soon she began to feel a level of sexual desire that had been largely suppressed by the contraceptive since she started taking it at 16. With natural hormones racing through her body for the first time in years, she realized she had never had the chance to experience the normal libido that young women discover as part of their maturation process.

"My body suddenly feels like a teenage girl's again," she said. On this point there is no debate: even proponents of the pill acknowledge that it reduces a woman's sexual drive. Therefore, millions of women spend much of their prime reproductive years never knowing the natural level of sexual feeling that is part of developing as a woman.

Read more of Elsie Enrhard's article "Overprescribing the Pill"

Source

• Image: 365dana.blogspot.com