Voluntary coitus from the onset of puberty through menopause is also natural.
There are a lot of good reasons to mess with the menstrual cycle, some of which are secondary to the typical modern lifestyle which typically features little physical activity and too much food. And the little physical activity part just isn’t going to change — the information age is here to stay, and most people need to spend large chunks of their time studying (from childhood through at least early adulthood) and processing information in connection with employment and personal affairs.
But it’s also not natural for women to have a period every month, because it’s natural for them to spend the vast majority of the time between puberty and menopause either pregnant or nursing. I’ve done a fair amount of genealogy research and can say with certainty that I’d had more periods before my 18th birthday than many of my female ancestors had in their entire lives (due to a combination of the much earlier onset of menstruation in modern times, and my ancestors’ non-stop childbearing beginning at marriage in their mid to late teens, which was also the typical age for onset of menstruation in those times). And plenty of research has shown that the hormone levels associated with natural menstruation are what correlate to higher incidence of breast cancer — more periods in one’s lifetime correlates very strongly with more breast cancer.
“Natural” is just not as compatible with civilization and long, healthy lives as many people would like to think.
Ok. You are arguing it is actually more natural to have less menstruation—as women did in previous ages. That might well be the case. However, you’re still prescribing an artificial means to get to a “natural” result...when a perfectly sensible natural means is there already as it was for our ancestors.
But why GS, why are doctors—and seemingly you yourself—so reluctant to advocate for a simple behavioral modification over a pharmaceutical solution in this case? It really doesn’t make any sense to me. Some will tell kids not to smoke, not to drink, not to have guns in the house for Pete’s sake, but then turn right around and say “well, you’ll have sex anyway, so here’s the Pill and some Gardasil.”
Far as I can tell, there’s NO medical reason for this attitude...just a very bad assumption inherited from the culture at large (and with Freudian roots I’m sure) that sex is some all-powerful force that cannot be resisted.
Oh, and one more thing to throw into the mix here. You’ve heard, I am sure, about the implicated effects that the synthetic estrogens from our sewers are having in feminizing fish populations?
The environmental movement itself seems to be awfully quiet about this finding...again, I believe, because it involves a certain kind of behavior modification that *they don’t like*.
This is not just doctors that are having this problem. It is the entire country at large. I’m afraid we have become sex-addled to the point where we are not seeing clearly anymore.