Showing posts with label Holly Grigg-Spall. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Holly Grigg-Spall. Show all posts
Friday, June 12, 2015
Exclusive Q&A with Ricki Lake, Abby Epstein, & Holly Grigg-Spall
What made you want to shed light on this topic of hormonal contraceptives?
Ricki: It really seemed like a very natural progression for us from ‘The Business of Being Born.’ Women spend more time trying to avoid pregnancy - a decade or more at the start, then they have babies, then they’re back to trying to avoid it for further decades. It’s an experience all women share. What we did for birth, we want to do for birth control, and empower women with more information and more choice. ‘The Business of Being Born’ was about body literacy and this project is the same - it’s about women knowing, understanding, and trusting their bodies.
Abby: We’ve both had our own negative experiences with different kinds of hormonal contraceptives over the years. We know other women who have experienced the same thing. Holly Grigg-Spall sent us her manuscript for ‘Sweetening the Pill: Or How We Got Hooked on Hormonal Birth Control’ and something just clicked when I was reading it. For the first time, I was connecting emotionally difficult periods in my life to the use of the pill and it just made so much sense to do this film. We could approach birth control with women’s empowerment in mind, too.
Holly: For me, I wrote the book because I had a pretty terrible personal experience with the Pill, which I used for ten years consistently. The book began as a blog that I wrote about coming off the Pill and my experience doing that, how it made me feel, finding alternative contraception, learning about my cycle and so on. That blog meant that lots of women got in touch to share their own stories. I realized the extent of this problem. I then soon realized it was really taboo almost to criticize the Pill or the culture around the Pill. That interested me. I saw ‘The Business of Being Born’ when I was actually writing the book and I made the connection right away. I wrote about the parallels between the birth and the birth control industries. I knew that the book could make the basis of a great documentary and that the absolute best people to do this would be Abby and Ricki. I set my sights on that. Of course, I am now over-the-moon about the film. A book is one thing, but a documentary like this can reach so many more women.
Why have you turned to Kickstarter to get this movie made?
Abby: We spent a year going the traditional route and we met with a few networks and production companies. We had a lot of discussion and a lot of real interest. People were saying this film could be “the Food Inc. of birth control.” Everyone has a story or knows someone who has a story about this, it’s just that kind of subject. But, it doesn’t have that commercial pull. It seems, at first, a little scary even. Some people struggle to understand the perspective. We have to explain that it is not anti-birth control or anti-Pill. Instead it is pro-informed consent, pro-choice, and pro-knowledge. We want women to have more options for contraception, not less! We want them to have more access, not less! It’s a feminist film project. This topic is very politicized right now, so that takes a little time to explain.
Ricki: People might not realize, but we didn’t actually make any money from ‘The Business of Being Born’ - it was hugely successful in many great ways, but we lost money. Documentaries are really passion projects. We know a grassroots effort is right for this project, it spreads awareness and gets the conversation going. Women will share their stories and may even share their stories for the film. They will have their experiences validated by this, which is so important. The campaign is doing really well, but we have to keep going strong to reach our goal now.
The Kickstarter campaign highlights Fertility Awareness Methods as a non-hormonal alternative, particularly when supported with apps and new technology. How did this area come to your attention?
Ricki: We got introduced to Kindara first through Holly’s book and we have met with them and discussed their work with their app and new wireless basal body thermometer, Wink. They want to democratize this knowledge, make it part of every woman’s education. They really think it could change things for the better when it comes to women’s lives. We also spoke with the makers of Clue in Berlin. They’re helping women track every part of their monthly cycle. It’s great progress for women’s reproductive health. Just this week we saw that Apple finally decided to add menstrual cycles to their HealthKit app. This is wonderful. It means other apps can sync with the native technology on the iPhone and it means more women will come to realize they can track their cycles and benefit from being aware of this information. They will be made aware of that option.
Abby: Really the technology sector is leading the way here. We’re seeing them step up and help and support women who don’t want to or can’t use hormonal contraceptives. They’re making using Fertility Awareness Methods simpler, easier, less time-consuming and more approachable. They’re getting in the media and getting their message out there. And these people are also a wealth of knowledge because thousands of women are using their apps and talking to them about their cycles and experiences.
A lot of women take the Pill for other issues these days, not just for contraception. Do you want to explore this?
Abby: Absolutely. A couple of our film advisers work in this area - providing holistic, natural reproductive health support. They are working with women who have found the Pill hasn’t helped them long term. They’ve had side effects or the problems they had before have returned after coming off. They’re struggling to get pregnant. The Pill is prescribed for so many health problems these days and, although it’s definitely helpful and even essential for some women, it’s not the right treatment in all situations. In the Kickstarter video we highlight one part of this - how women are using it to regulate their cycles, even though they’re getting misleading information on that.
Holly: This is such an important area. More and more women are on the Pill for everything from acne to PCOS and yet the Pill doesn’t treat these problems, it only masks them. When women come off, most commonly the issue returns and might even be worse than before. We think that women have to suffer with PMS, like it’s our destiny, inevitable, when actually a lot of hormonal balance-related problems can be treated properly long term with alternative protocols. Women deserve better. They don’t have to put up with this stuff. And they don’t always have to use drugs that give them side effects to fix the problem. For some women, as Abby says, hormonal contraceptives are essential treatment. But we’re at a point now where it’s being doled out like a cure-all and it’s just not.
Thursday, May 15, 2014
"Home Made Menstrual Period for Game-Playing With Doctors” by Holly Grigg-Spall
Friends:I’m sharing this blog by Holly Grigg-Spall, author of Sweetening the Pill because, like Holly, I think The Abortion Handbook, written by Lana Clarke Phelan and Patricia Maginnis, is as timely today as it was when it was published over forty years ago (with some outdated sections, of course).
Holly’s comments about how Lana’s and Pat’s tips on “faking our periods” fit right in with women’s performance art work designed to bring menstruation out of the closet. This reminds us that our work on our reproductive and sexual health cannot be divided into departments of menstruation, birth, birth control, abortion, menopause. All these aspects are interconnected, and if we’re working for reproductive and sexual control, all our projects must be interconnected too.
http://menstruationresearch.org/2014/05/14/home-made-menstrual-period-for-game-playing-with-doctors/
Tuesday, October 8, 2013
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.
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.
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?
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.
Wednesday, August 28, 2013
"SWEETENING THE PILL OR HOW WE GOT HOOKED ON HORMONAL BIRTH CONTROL" by Holly Grigg-Spall
When the Pill was released, it was thought that women would not submit to taking a medication each day when they were not sick. Now the Pill is making women sick.
However, there are a growing number of women looking for non-hormonal alternatives for preventing pregnancy. In a bid to spark a backlash against hormonal contraceptives, this book asks: Why can't we criticize the Pill?
Carol Downer's endorsement: "We discovered in the '70s that the personal is political. Holly Grigg-Spall starts with her and other women's personal experiences with the Pill, then thoughtfully and thoroughly considers it scientifically, medically and philosophically to discover the political truth of the Pill. She shares strategies for finding new ways to control our fertility while regaining control of our destiny. Grigg-Spall's careful study on the Pill's effect on women's health is long, long overdue. We are so busy fighting to keep hormonal birth control available that we don't want to question what it is doing to our health and our lives. After reading this book, we can never see the Pill in the same way again."
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