Women's Need for Accurate Information About Birth Control Gets Lost in Controversy over Zimbabwe Official’s Speech About Dangers of Birth Control

By Carol Downer

The pro-natalist population controllers say they’re concerned about our health, and they charge that hormonal contraceptives are dangerous to our health, therefore we should stop taking them and have more babies; the other side says they’re concerned about our health, and they present the facts that show that the benefits of hormonal contraceptives outweigh the risk, so it’s prudent to use them to prevent unwanted pregnancy.  Who’s “facts” do we believe? 

Who’s checking the fact checkers, especially when they check up on jingoistic statements that we want to see proven wrong.  When a pro-natalist Zimbabwean official tells his countrywomen “to multiply” in order for Zimbabwe to be a “superpower” and warns that birth control can cause cancer, we can see that he’s trying to exploit women’s fears.  But, we must be equally wary when those of the “anti-natalist persuasion” rush to allay our fears.  When the facts start flying about what’s best for women’s bodies, those of us who want to control our reproduction without governmental interference have to carefully analyze this ideologically-driven debate.   

In the article, “Zimbabwe Registrar’s Claim that Contraception Causes Cancer is Misleading and Alarmist”, Africa Check cites two main claims by Zimbabwe Official Tobaiwa Mudede in his speech at an Africa Day celebration in Harare on May 25.  They ignore his first assertion that the promotion of birth control is a ploy by western nations to retard population growth in Africa.

They contact WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) and their check reveals his facts are right.  IARC confirms that there can be a link between the use of oral and injectable hormonal contraceptives and particular types of cancer, increasing the risk in some cases and lowering it in others.  Dr. Elvira Singh of IARC gives their overview of the various risk factors for cancer in taking the Pill or the Shot; she concludes that Mudede’s comments are “alarmist”.  Dr. Singh’s support of the Pill and the Shot shows her complacency about the dangers of the Pill or the Shot, given that there a number of other equally effective but far safer barrier methods equally available.  She only compares the danger of the Pill or the Shot to doing nothing at all to prevent pregnancy.  Birth has dangers so the Pill and the Shot compare well with that.    

Abby Johnston of Bustle.com’s article, a shortened version of Africa Check’s, sums up WHO’s position as “the benefit far exceeds the risks” with contraceptive use, and mis-quotes Africa Check in saying that “the higher the birth rate in a country, the higher the maternal mortality rate”.  Fact?  The UN only said the dangers of having more children could result in increased mortality rate.  Johnston reveals her true concern, “Access and education on birth control is particularly important in areas facing overpopulation.”  She presumably means Africa.  African women, just as much as other women, need to have an unbiased comparison of all methods of birth control; www.birth-control-comparison.info

Methinks that the reason that Africa Check didn’t check the facts concerning Mudede’s allegation that there are those in the West that push birth control because they fear population growth in Africa, is because it is also based on fact.  Some people confuse the feminist demand that we have control over our reproduction with the anti-natalist drive to reduce those populations they believe are excessive.  These anti-natalist forces, usually wealthy families, use their money and influence to support national and international policies to push birth control as the primary way to attack poverty and environmental degradation.  They use the rhetoric of women’s liberation, but their foundations and university-funded projects push oral and injectable hormonal contraception, no matter how harmful these methods may be. 

Unfortunately, the anti-natalists have been wildly successful so far in keeping a low profile, framing their proposals as giving women “choice”.  But, as a start to understanding the controversy between these two sides, there is an excellent book out that gives us a road map to the christian patriarchy movement and a description and history of national and international pro-natalist trends.  I urge supporters of women’s reproductive rights to read my review of “Quiverfull” by Kathryn Joyce, a contributing reporter for Nation Magazine.  I think it is important for us to face the growing pro-natalist movement in the United States, the popular base for the right-wing politicians who are closing down abortion clinics. 

Pill Popular with Slate's Beyerstein but Feminists Have Doubts

By Carol Downer

The women’s health movement has had a healthy skepticism about all the invasive methods of birth control developed in the last half century--IUD’s and various type of pills.  Women stormed the Pill hearings in 1970 because they saw that no women were participating in the research or the government approval process, and they were leery of women taking a powerful drug - it stops the reproductive machine in its tracks - to control fertility.  Safe, effective methods of birth control existed that women had used in certain societies for many decades.

Lindsay Beyerstein, in her review of Holly Grigg-Spall’s “Sweetening The Pill” seems unaware of our protests, including Barbara Seaman’s explosive work, “The Doctor’s Case Against the Pill”.  Our efforts, mostly through the National Women’s Health Network, have continued over the years, forcing the drug companies to improve their inserts and to lower dosages, so that some of the more catastrophic complications that showed up right away have been substantially lowered.  Still, today, no women’s health advocate will dismiss Holly Grigg-Spall’s questions about the way that the Pill has been marketed, the way it’s been pushed by population control organizations in their clinics and the implications of millions of women taking a pill that may change their emotional hard-wiring.  Furthermore, the net social result of millions of women walking around having drug-induced feelings of sadness and depression is unfathomable.

Feminist health activists’ lack of enthusiasm about the Pill has continued, but women have voted with their feet.  They’ve embraced the Pill.  Even the harshest critics of the Pill, the Feminist Women’s Health Centers, have given out the Pill freely since they opened their doors in 1973 because women want it.  The National Women’s Health Network focuses its efforts on making the Pill as safe as possible, not on restricting its distribution.  Regarding screening out women with high risk of complication, we say, “There’s no woman sick enough to justify keeping her from taking the Pill; there’s no woman healthy enough to protect her from suffering severe side effects of the Pill.”  We know the realities of our lives, and we respect the calculations any woman makes when she determines what birth control method she will use.  After we’ve made sure she has the most up-to-date information available, we fight for her right to choose whatever method she thinks best.

We know, from running our women’s clinics, that an inordinate number of women are taking anti-depressants.  No one is really doing the kind of research that would give us answers as to what is causing that widespread experience of depression.

So, why does Slate, a progressive on-line magazine not pay respectful attention to a serious book which questions the safety of a pill being taken by millions of women at a time when the research into the actions of hormones in our body are at an infant stage?  Aren’t we progressives worried about government approval of routine genetic modification of the public’s food supply. (Oh, I forgot. The government regulators that Beyerstein places her trust in did approve GMO, didn’t they?)

Does Grigg-Spall’s book not merit respectful review because it calls into question the popular myth of the benefits of the Pill?  Lindsay Beyerstein claims, “The pill ushered in a new era of educational and professional attainment for women.  As a discreet, highly-effective, and fully female-controlled form of birth control, the pill allowed women to plan their families, space their births, and even delay childbearing long enough to establish themselves in careers.”

This statement reads like the drug company’s promotional ad.  It’s misleading.  When comparing the Pill with non-invasive methods of birth control, they’re about equal in effectiveness when used properly, and about equal when not used properly!  Running abortion clinics, we find that about as many women become pregnant taking the Pill as using other methods especially if one takes into consideration the oft-occurring situation where a woman suffers a side-effect of the Pill which causes her to quit and before she can institute a new method, she’s pregnant!

She says it’s wonderful that the Pill is a female-controlled form of birth control.  When I asked Dr. Hugh Davis, inventor of an IUD, why they hadn’t tried a birth control pill on men, his answer was, “We couldn’t get the (reproductive) tracts.”  Even if most women envision themselves as having a career, isn’t the real feminist battle to change society so that having a baby is not a career-derailing event?

Or is Grigg-Spall dismissed because perhaps she thinks that today’s woman is not really that thrilled to drop her children off at a day care center so that she can plug through a day that’s as dreary as their father’s?  Or maybe Beyerstein is unaware of the science of demography, or the machinations of industrialists, or the schemes of social planners who are funded by elite foundations?  She should read Betty Friedan who spent two years looking at the files of public relations firms and interviewed the manufacturers who hired them to discover how much the “Feminine Mystique” was created by the post World-War II media to convince American women to stay home and buy more household furnishings and appliances to support “patriarchal capitalism”.  Oh, where is Betty when we need her!

My favorite explanation is that Beyerstein’s intemperate review comes from her fear that Grigg-Spall wants to make women, including herself, revel in her bodily procreative functions, thus making her into an incubator.  (Beyerstein makes a gratuitous side swipe against women who want to breast feed or not have epidurals.)  I don’t get that implication.  I believe that Grigg-Spall is sharing her concern that the social pressures and inequality of opportunity that women have that leads them to take the Pill is resulting in their enduring years of feeling sub-par.  She is impressing the reader with the enormity of the monkey wrench that the Pill is throwing into the functioning of our bodies.

Beyerstein dismisses Grigg-Spall’s experiences as irrelevant, and insists that only scientific studies, (note: funded by the manufacturers), are to be trusted.  Well, the second wave of feminism was founded on the rock of “the personal is political”.  It was when we sat in a circle and shared our individual stories that we realized our position in the whole scheme of things.  I do not think that Grigg-Spall has “proven” that the Pill is creating generations of Stepford Wives, but I wish that there was some research designed to find out what’s going on with women today who sometimes seem to lose their revolutionary zeal.   Taking a hormone-like drug that makes one feel blue may not be the whole explanation, but it deserves looking into.

Lastly, is it inaccurate for Grigg-Spall to say that the Pill is equivalent to castration?  Well, no one would deny that it is temporarily castrating, that is, when a woman is taking the Pill, her gonads are not working.  But, over a period of years, the Pill can permanently stop the ovary from ovulating.  Now, that’s castration.  Maybe that doesn’t bother some people.  But, remember, hormones, which are manufactured in the ovary circulate through the blood and go into each and every cell of our body.  These incredibly tiny molecules (about which we know appallingly little) cause changes in each cell, different depending on the function of the cell.  These changes are poorly understood and new ones are being discovered every day. 

I would hope that Slate finds another reviewer who understands that birth control and abortion are hotly-debated topics that are hotly debated global population policy forum.  A woman’s decision regarding her sexuality and reproduction are private decisions, however a battle rages between the camp which wants to engineer women’s choices such that they choose to have fewer children, the camp which wants to engineer those choices in the direction of fewer children, and the women’s health movement which is working to change society so that women can have true choice, because society would provide support for any child they would have.  Without that perspective, Slate finds itself in the company of the first camp.

Response to Carol Downer's "Margaret Sanger Award"

Women's Health in Women's Hands received the following comment on its Facebook page.  It was a response to an announcement of Carol Downer's "Margaret Sanger Award" (awarded by the Veteran Feminists of America).  

You must be so proud..."We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members." -Margaret Sanger 

Here is Carol Downer's response:

Yes, I am so proud to be getting the Margaret Sanger award, because I know, from extensive reading about Margaret Sanger’s lifelong work to put birth control in the hands of all women, that she was not a bigot and she certainly did not harbor any genocidal tendencies. She did, however, make alliances with those wealthy elites who seek to control population, especially those of people of color, to deal with the dangers of overpopulation, rather than give up their prerogatives. She did make mistakes, but she would not have countenanced anything that would “exterminate the Negro population”, a phrase she was clearly using to mock intemperate accusations that she was anticipating.

I know that she worked tirelessly to urge women of all nationalities, cultural backgrounds and ethnic groups, to use birth control to limit their families. I read the quote that you rely on to show her genocidal tendencies to in fact show her awareness of not only the genocidal implications of use of birth control to wipe out undesirable populations, but also her awareness that those who oppose birth control for nationalistic or religious reasons often yell “racism” to cover their own pro-natalist motivations. She says “we don’t want the word to get out”, not “we don’t want the word to go out”.

If you knew more about Margaret Sanger, you would know that she was a fiery socialist from a working-class background, and her earliest work focused especially on poor people, mostly white working-class women. When wealthy white women took over her organization, directing it in much more conservative direction, she abandoned her grassroots approach. She re-married a very wealthy man, Noah Slee, the inventor of 3-in-1 oil which put her on par with them.

The reason that I continue to admire Margaret, even though she was closely associated with Planned Parenthood, which has a spotty record on forcing birth control on vulnerable populations, and even though she and her very wealthy associate, Katherine McCormick, were the prime movers in the development of the birth control pill, is that I know that she always stuck up for the right of a woman to control her own body--that was her bottom line.

Furthermore, and this is the most important reason that I admire her despite her compromises and mistakes in choice of allies is that I see the leaders in the women’s movement, and other progressive movements, making the same mistakes today--and this includes women of color and the movement that challenges gender stereotypes. They accept funding from the same elites that Margaret did, telling themselves that they can take their money without accepting their influence, and they seem less aware than Margaret was about the political price they are paying for this easy money. I respect and admire these groups as well, despite the mistakes that I believe they are currently making.

I recommend that you educate yourself about the field of population control and the propaganda wars being fought on both sides, those that want to limit population growth and those that want to increase it. Whoever put out that incendiary quote, completely out of the context, had a motive, and I can guarantee you that it was not to promote the rights of people of color or the rights of women.

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