When I first began reading The Pill - Are You Sure It’s For You?, I was just mildly curious. As a mid-life woman who had been taking the pill for some years, I felt that the book had some relevance to me. The last time I’d tried to give up the pill and replace it with an alternative method of birth control, I was talked out of it by my gynaecologist, who told me that the Pill was the best method and that everything else was substandard. I felt some disquiet about the notion of continually putting hormones into my healthy body, but decided to listen to him. Jane Bennett and Alexandra Pope made me think again.
Although nearly any doctor you speak to will tell you that the modern pill is a very low dose, and that it’s absolutely safe, Bennet and Pope present a number of studies that have linked the pill with depression, moodiness, weight gain, brittle bones, low libido, nutritional difficulties, and even a very recent death. This isn’t the first time either that the pill has been linked with death. In chapter eight of The Pill the authors look at the link between the pill and thrombosis, stroke, heart attack and Cancer, and find some reasonably significant correlations, particularly for those with a wide range of pre-existing conditions (the list is nearly a page long!). Contraindications are extensive, and few people are told how many different drugs not only interfere with the Pill’s effectiveness, but are also 
interfered with by the pill, sometimes in tragic ways. It’s common sense that anything strong enough to interrupt a woman’s normal hormonal cycle would be strong enough to have at least some side effects, and certainly, medical research aside, there is a tremendous amount of anecdotal evidence to suggest that side effects from the pill are very common.
The book takes a holistic approach to womens' health and menstruation, and looks at the ways in which the pill works, dissecting and explaining its hormonal effects, and then looks at evidence around the negative effect of the pill. It’s eye-opening reading, but The Pill isn’t all negative. A range of alternatives are presented, including barrier methods, spermicides, and the IUD. They also provide another method which I really wasn’t aware of, but which is a superb alternative: Fertility Awareness. There are a few different methods of Fertility Awareness around, and not all of them will be right for everyone – most rely on the combination of charting body temperature and cervical mucus to determine exactly what is happening in your body. In other words, and forgive me if this strikes you as revolutionary, to accept our cycles as completely natural, and begin working with them.
Article comments
1 - Natalie Bennett
This is one view - an alternative one is that it is "natural" - as in what our bodies have done for almost all of human history except the past few hundred years, for a woman to have maybe a dozen periods in her life, tops. The rest of her reproductive years she'd either be pregnant or infertile because she was breastfeeding.
So to have, as a woman easily can now - say starting at 10 and with menopause at 50 - some 480 periods in her life, is profoundly unnatural. The pill in fact mimics pregnancy, so perhaps the most natural thing is to take the pill for three or four months at a time, have maybe three periods a year, and then have something like 30, closer to the "natural" norm, over your reproductive lifespan.
And of course it is a damn sight more convenient...
2 - Maggie Ball
Thanks Natalie, I appreciate your taking the time to provide what is a very relevant alternative view. The key thing I think is that each person has the information and understanding of their own bodies to make the right personal decision, rather than one mandated purely by convenience to doctors and profit to drug companies. That isn't to say that I'm against the pill -- I think it has been a wonderful thing for women and is absolutely right for some. But for others, to present it as the only choice (and that is often the case), is simply wrong. The more we talk (and debate) about this often hushed up subject, the more information we'll have to make decisions that are right for ourselves. All the best. Maggie