(Davina McCall fronts a new Channel 4 Documentary which exposes the problems with and dangers of The Pill)
The contraceptive pill has had a bad few months. In March, a study foundthat use of progesterone-only contraceptives is associated with a 20 to 30 per cent higher risk of breast cancer. As the feminist writer Caroline Criado-Perez noted in the Times, “that’s another unwanted side-effect, to go along with the increased risk of blood clots we already knew about (blood clots are not more likely if you’re on a progesterone-only method).” The increase in the risk of breast cancer was associated with all forms of progestogen-containing contraception, regardless of the method of delivery: patch, implant, coil or pill.
In fact, I have seen a big increase in feminist writers wondering out loud if the contraceptive pill was really all it has been cracked up to be. Or at the very least they now understand that women who take it are expected to put up with many serious side effects, the sort that most men simply would not endure. In the wake of the news, Charlie Gowans-Eglinton wrote: “I stopped taking the contraceptive pill a few weeks shy of my 30th birthday. It was a snap decision, made the day that my sister was diagnosed with breast cancer aged 32.”
Libby Purves, also in the Times,examined the social impact of the pill, claiming it brought women more freedom but not more respect. The pill revolutionised sex but let men off the hook, while coming with side-effects. She asks where the non-hormonal alternatives are.
As Madeleine Teahan explained in the Catholic Herald, there is of course a non-hormonal alternative to the pill: something called natural fertility awareness or “Natural Family Planning”, which most Catholics are familiar with.
The latest examination of the pill will be made by Channel 4 by Davina McCall. She will be fronting a hard-hitting new documentary called “The Pill” about women turning their backs on contraception. Indeed, it is a fact that oral contraception use has more than halved, while natural family planning methods have nearly tripled in the last 10 years. On social media, women for a while now been speaking out about side effects they’ve put up with for years and saying enough is enough.
Even ultra-feminist Zoe Williams points out inthe Guardian, when discussing the possibility of a male contraceptive pill, that any such pill “reorientates a rarely spoken, but often iterated attitude to the body, where the female is a problem to be fixed and the male is sovereign, not to be tinkered with.”
I doubt any of these writers or presenters have read their Theology of the Body recently, but they are right about this. The problem with the pill as artificial contraception, and why it was considered against Catholic teaching in Humanae Vitae (1968) issued by Pope Paul VI, was exactly this: the pill and those who advocated for it treated female fertility not as a gift from God to be cherished and respected but as a problem to be solved or indeed “cancelled”.
The Pope made several predictions in 1968 should the use of the pill become widespread. The Pill, Humanae Vitae declared, “opened up a wide and easy road… toward conjugal infidelity and the general lowering of morality. Man, growing used to contraceptive practices, may lose respect for the woman and come to the point of considering her as a mere instrument of selfish enjoyment, and no longer as his respected and beloved companion.”
It should be remembered that just before Humanae Vitae, the expectation was that the Pope would approve of The Pill as a form of natural contraception and that it would therefore be acceptable in the eyes of the Catholic Church. In fact Humane Vitae came as a surprise to many Vatican observers and in the immediate aftermath it received much criticism and many Catholic women ignored it.
It is time for those who rounded upon Humanae Vitae and the Pope to admit that he was absolutely correct on every single one of these predictions. In fact, I doubt even he believed how bad the collapse in morality would be. Infidelity did indeed grow, divorce increased, the abortion rate sky-rocketed, and disrespect for women became wide-spread. This disrespect for women (evidenced in it’s extreme form by pornography) became so wide-spread that it prompted counterrevolutions such as the “Me Too” movement, and the writing of books such as The Case Against the Sexual Revolution by Louise Perry.
The jury is well and truly in on The Pill, and it is falling out of favour fast. Nearly five decades later the world is turning against it. Even the secular world is beginning to understand the problem with The Pill that the Vatican highlighted all those years ago. It attacks the inherent dignity and humanity of women and would cause men to view women as mere instruments of enjoyment. Pope Paul VI was right in 1968. Finally the world is catching up.
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