The Motley Monk Blog: The "contraceptive mentality" and the "culture of death"...

Sunday, January 22, 2012

The "contraceptive mentality" and the "culture of death"...

"contraceptive mentality," n., "a hedonistic mentality unwilling to accept responsibility in matters of sexuality … a self-centered concept of freedom, which regards procreation as an obstacle to personal fulfillment" (Evanglium vitae, #13)

In the name of "women's rights" and "reproductive health," nearly 100M women worldwide are using some form of combined oral contraceptive, with Catholic women using them at the same rate as non-Catholic women.

What is interesting to The Motley Monk about this phenomenon is how those who use combined oral contraceptives (and those who promote their use as well) conveniently ignore the growing body of evidence which questions the safety of the most popular forms of combined oral contraceptives.

A Motley Monk Alert:

The facts about the safety

of the most popular forms

of combined oral contraceptives

Oral contraceptives have been linked to a heightened risk for breast, liver and cervical cancers, heart attack, stroke, and blood clots, among others.

In particular, combined oral contraceptives increase the risk of venous thromboembolisms (VTEs)---blood clots in large veins that can break loose, travel through the blood stream, and block an artery in the lungs (pulmonary embolism)---for women during their childbearing years. More alarming, users of second and third generation oral contraceptives have a 2-7 times greater risk of VTEs than non-users. In the United States alone, VTEs may be responsible for some 100k deaths annually.

If that's not enough, one of the newest and most popular types of oral contraceptives---Yaz, Beyaz, Yasmin, and Safryal which contain synthetic estrogen and a progestin called "drospirenone"---presents an even greater risk of VTE.

Two studies published by the British Medical Journal in 2011 indicated that women who use Yaz had a two to three times greater risk of blood clots than women who use other combined oral contraceptives. In September 2011, the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) announced that "preliminary results of the FDA-funded study suggest an approximately 1.5 fold increase in the risk of blood clots for women who use drospirenone-containing birth control pills compared to users of other hormonal contraceptives." In late October, the FDA confirmed its findings.

In November 2011, the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) published a study involving ~330k women in Israel. The finding? The "risk of venous thrombotic events was significantly greater among drospirenone users than among users of third generation combined oral contraceptives." How big of a risk? 1 of every 1,000 women who use drospirenone containing contraceptives will experience a VTE during use.

Another study, conducted in Denmark and published in the British Medical Journal, found that the risk for women who use Drospirenone OCPs have "a sixfold to sevenfold increased risk" of VTE compared to non-users.

All of this translates into early deaths that otherwise would not be.

With 100M women using oral contraception today, ~80k of them face life-threatening VTEs. This is 50k more cases of VTEs than if no woman used combined oral contraception. However, if women practice combined oral contraception as recommended for 30 years, of those 100M women using the pill every year over 30 years, ~2.4M will experience VTEs, 1.5M of whom simply because they ingested oral contraception.

Artificial birth control: "The Pope's Vietnam"

The Motley Monk would note that the "contraceptive mentality" shields women from confronting these inconvenient medical facts because the contraceptive mentality is rooted in the false belief that women "own" their bodies and have the "right" to do with their bodies as they wish...with no consequences whatsoever.

The Church has consistently taught that no human being "owns" one's body and possesses the "right" to do with one's body as one wishes. This mentality, the Church teaches, breeds what Blessed John Paul II called the "culture of death."

What does a Pope know about women's bodies and their rights anyway?