Why the Little Sisters of the Poor should embrace birth control pills
By Robin Abcarian
January 30, 2014, 12:55 p.m.
Leave it to the brilliant Malcolm Potts to explain why the Little Sisters of the Poor, the Colorado nuns who recently won an interim U.S. Supreme Court victory, are hurting themselves, not just their female employees, by claiming that they should be exempt from offering contraceptive coverage with their healthcare benefits.
Potts, a UC Berkeley public health professor who is an obstetrician and embryologist, is a celebrity in international reproductive health circles. For decades he has pioneered advances in women’s reproductive health, particularly in the developing world.
Potts writes, many nuns would benefit physically from taking birth control pills — not for contraception, obviously, but for their health.
I got a call from EWTN (the catholic cable channel) about that bogus medicine for nuns suggested in the Lancet and by Potts, and was able to sprinkle some pharmaceutical common sense on the issue.
The premise was that medicating nuns with hormones throughout their lives could protect them from increased incidence of breast cancer and endometrial cancer.
The problem is that, as admitted by these so called researchers, nuns don’t exhibit increased incidence of these problems (compared to other women) until their 70s and 80s. The pill does not protect against breast cancer. In fact there’s a fresh new study out in the Indian J. of Cancer touting the opposite.
Taking birth control for many decades, and risking all of the side effects of those pills, including hypertension, thrombotic events, metabolic disorders, etc, to Slightly lessen diseases which don’t show up until very old age, would be nonsensical.
(Think of these kinds of considerations each time the doc wants to throw another pill at you for “Prevention”.)
The huge change in the recommendations for hormone replacement therapy in post menopausal women was because the observed risk vs benefit of the drugs did not justify their use to prevent diseases. Potts writes as though he is frozen in time for the last 15 years and has not heard of such a thing which even made big news in the mainstream press.
Some of the “advances” in reproductive medicine in the developing world are very scary, such as dispensing misoprostil to women for home abortions. This is not a “one size fits all” kind of drug, if one has any concern for such hazards as uterine rupture. One wonders if Potts has had his celebrity hands in this debacle too.
I might not be allowed to link my personal blog here, but if you google “down on the pharm” then search in the blog for “nuns birth control” you can find a couple more links.