Sweetening the Pill: or How We Got Hooked on Hormonal Birth Control

Sweetening the Pill: or How We Got Hooked on Hormonal Birth Control

The book that inspired the documentary  The Business of Birth Control, from filmmaking team Ricki Lake and Abby Epstein. -- Millions of healthy women take a powerful medication everyday from their mid-teens to menopause - the Pill - but few know how this drug works or the potential side effects. Contrary to cultural myth, the birth-control pill impacts on every organ and function of the body, and yet most women do not even think of it as a drug.   Depression, anxiety, paranoia, rage, panic attacks - just a few of the effects of the Pill on half of the over 80% of women who pop these tablets during their lifetimes. 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 thePill 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 the backlash against hormonal contraceptives, this book asks: Why can't we criticize the Pill? Holly Grigg-Spall is fearless, and her courageous advocacy on behalf of women whose stories are too often silenced is a model for others trying to make positive change through health activism. Read the book and get inspired, get angry, and most importantly get information. Sweetening the Pill is exactly the thing needed to energize and mobilize this important women's health conversation. -- Laura Eldridge , author of In Our Control: The Complete Guide to Contraceptive Choices for Women and co-author and co-editor with Barbara Seaman of The No-Nonsense Guide to Menopause. In Sweetening the Pill Holly Grigg-Spall lays out the reality of hormonal contraception, and the ubiquitous political and commercial interests at play, with breathtaking precision. With most young women using these drugs, and providers cynically side-stepping informed consent and respectful consultation, this is a core and urgent issue of our time. If you are interested in teen girl and womens' health, and the wellbeing and evolution of society as a whole read Sweetening the Pill . It's a riveting read and a powerful tool for change. -- Jane Bennett , co-author of The Pill: Are You Sure It's For You? 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. -- Carol Downer is a veteran women's health activist and author of A New View of a Woman's Body , How to Stay Out of the Gynecologist's Office , A Woman's Book of Choices and Woman Centered Pregnancy and Birth . Holly Grigg-Spall effectively melts the candy coating that obscures a simple truth: what we don't know, can indeed hurt us. Sweetening the Pill , equal parts personal journey, investigative journalism and feminist manifesto, cracks open the paternalist and corporate-driven ethos of self-improvement that undermines women's body literacy. We've got to demand better: more transparency, more options and more support for self-determined health care. Getting there begins with the kind of courageous inquiry Grigg-Spall inspires. -- Chris Bobel, associate professor of Women's Studies at University of Massachusetts Boston and author of New Blood: Third Wave Feminism and the Politics of Menstruation Excerpt © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. INTRODUCTION: IT'S NOT ME When I returned to the doctor who had prescribed me the birth control pill Yasmin three years earlier I told her that I had spent the time since slowly unraveling. I had whirled through many levels of misery before realizing that my choice of contraception could be the cause. Yasmin was the third oral contraceptive I had taken in a decade. I was seventeen when I popped the first pill. The doctor listened quietly and then said, "I took the pill for twenty years. When I came off it, I realized I was a completely different person to who I'd thought. I had been depressed the whole time and now I'm much, much happier." She then suggested I give a different brand, Femodette, a try. Although puzzled, I conceded and took her prescription. Yasmin was released in 2001 by the pharmaceutical companyBayer Pharmaceuticals and followed by its descendent Yaz in 2006. They are different from other pill brands because they contain a new progestin(synthetic progesterone) component, drospirenone. I started taking Yasmin in2006 when it seemed as though every woman I knew was doing t