I don't know why this never occurred to me before, but it took an article on Planned Parenthood's sex-ed Web site Teenwire to make me realize what is possibly the most insidious effect of Lybrel, the new oral contraceptive that eliminates periods.
Planned Parenthood freelance writer Aaron Dunn notes in "Lybrel: A New Approach to Birth Control":
... in the rare case that you do become pregnant while on the pill, you won't have that missed period to let you know. The only way you'll know for sure is through a pregnancy test.Lybrel's effectiveness rate is the same as that of other oral contraceptives, meaning that with typical use, one out of 20 users will become pregnant within one year.
Without the missed period to let her know she is pregnant, a Lybrel user risks going much further into a pregnancy without realizing it than she would if she were menstruating. If she then decides she wants the baby, she will have missed out on vital prenatal care — plus, Lybrel's hormones can't be good for her unborn child. Likewise, if she decides on an abortion, it will be a later abortion than it would be had she known of her pregnancy sooner.
The later the abortion, the more money Planned Parenthood makes, since the procedure becomes increasingly more expensive as the pregnancy progresses. No doubt Planned Parenthood expects to profit "Lybrel"-ly from this new means of messing with women's biology — hence its use of Teenwire to promote the pill. Get 'em while they're young.
For this pill that makes teenage girls effectively menopausal, the PR wizards at Planned Parenthood have come up with an Orwellian phrase: "continuous cycling." It refers to just the opposite of what it seems to describe: continuously having no menstrual cycle.
With that in mind, the Teenwire article's ending is remarkably creepy, even by Planned Parenthood's standards:
... modern women, who are not pregnant for much of their adult life, are already having more periods than in the past - so that continuous cycling is, in a way, more "natural."Got that? Because women used to have fewer periods due to their having more children, it is "natural" for women to chemically sterilize themselves so that they will have no periods and no children.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. And self-imposed sterilization is "natural." Welcome to the world of Planned Parenthood.
