Dangerous tinkering with women's endocrine system in single-minded pursuit of convenient reproductive control'

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Thursday approved the country’s first hormonal birth control pill for over-the-counter sale despite its significant health risks to women.

Opill, a life-prevention pill manufactured by French drugmaker HRA Pharma, is a progestin-only daily contraceptive that will now be available for sale without a prescription. It is expected to be available in stores for over-the-counter purchase beginning early next year.

Progestin is a synthetic form of progesterone, a hormone secreted during pregnancy. Progestin fools the female body into thinking it is already pregnant and thereby prevents conception.

“Today’s approval marks the first time a nonprescription daily oral contraceptive will be an available option for millions of people in the United States,” the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research Director Dr. Patrizia Cavazzoni said in a statement.

“When used as directed, daily oral contraception is safe and is expected to be more effective than currently available nonprescription contraceptive methods in preventing unintended pregnancy,” Cavazzoni said. The FDA expressed hope that its approval will reduce unwanted pregnancies, estimated at three million a year.

Media and feminist operatives are cheering the news while dismissing the pill’s significant health risks as “conservative influencer talking points”.

“Major conservative influencers have coalesced in recent months around talking points that connect birth control with a variety of negative health outcomes, which experts say instill fear in women who could otherwise benefit from using birth control,” MSNBC tweeted this month.

Those “negative health outcomes” include a 20%–30% increased risk of breast cancer among women who take hormonal contraceptives. Furthermore, according to a Danish study of over one million women, those who took progestin-only hormonal contraceptives were 34% more likely to be diagnosed with depression or be prescribed antidepressants. The number shot up to 80% among teenage girls.

But hormonal birth control also poses other serious health risks, both to women and humanity as a whole.

Studies have found that sexual attraction is in part determined by a block of genetic code referred to as the major histocompatibility complex (MHC). As they approach ovulation, healthy women are attracted to men with masculine features and who are MHC-dissimilar, meaning they carry a distinctly different genetic code. This genetic disparity leads to more robust immune systems in offspring and has allowed humans to develop strong defenses against various pathogens and diseases.

Because MHC is conveyed through a person’s scent pheromones, women can become attracted to a man based on his smell, which gives off a “clue” about his genetic coding.

But hormonal contraceptives which disrupt women’s hormonal cycles have been shown to also disrupt their normal attraction choices. Instead of being attracted to more masculine men who are genetically unrelated, women on birth control have been more likely to develop attraction for men with more feminine features and more similar MHCs.

The attraction itself is also more fickle. Evidence shows that women who pair up with MHC-similar men are less likely to be sexually satisfied and more likely to commit infidelity than those involved with MHC-dissimilar males.

Women who become entangled in relationships with MHC-similar men and then stop taking hormonal contraceptives may find that they are no longer attracted to their partner.

“[W]omen who had used hormonal contraceptives when they first met their partner and then ceased to take them experience lower levels of sexual and relationship satisfaction and are more likely to get divorced,” wrote Gurit E. Birnbaum, Ph.D. for Psychology Today.

In her book The Fifth Vital Sign: Master Your Cycles & Optimize Your Fertility, fertility expert Lisa Hendrickson-Jack brings a first-hand account from a woman who stopped taking her birth control:

Within weeks, I found that my significant other was less attractive to me. He had a smell I had never noticed, and a couple of months post-pill I was finding that he completely disgusted me. Don't get me wrong, great guy!! He's very sweet, hard-working, would never treat a woman badly, but I couldn't even bear to kiss him anymore, so I broke it off.

But not only do women on birth control find masculine men less desirable, they can become less desirable themselves. According to several studies, women who are not on birth control are found more desirable by men than those who are. In one study involving apes, male cynomolgus monkeys who had sex with females on hormonal birth control did not even ejaculate.

“It's almost as if they have some level of awareness of [sic] the pill-taking female is a reproductive dead-end and would rather save the energy that would be required to punctuate their sexual behavior with gamete release to do something else,” explained Insider.

In another study, female dancers at a nightclub who were not on the pill made an extra $83 in tips on average than those who were taking hormonal birth control.

And, since birth control blocks the genetic dissimilarity that creates strong offspring, children born to mothers who took birth control are found to be weaker and less healthy, according to researchers from Reichman University in Israel.

“Results confirmed our predictions, indicating that children to mothers who were on the pill are more infection prone, require more medical care, suffer from a higher frequency of common sicknesses, and are perceived as generally less healthy than children whose parents met on non-pill circumstances,” concluded the researchers, who expressed concern for the health of future generations.

“[T]he immune system of current-generation children might be more fragile than that of our ancestors, leaving the current and future generations more susceptible to pathogens and more dependent on medical care as its effective line of defense,” they added.

Men. Women. Relationships: Surviving the Plague of Modern Masculinity Author Paul Elam says this is yet another reason to distrust the pharmaceutical industry, particularly Perrigo, which owns HRA Pharma.

“This is, and always has been, dangerous tinkering with women's endocrine system in the single-minded pursuit of convenient reproductive control,” Elam told Frontline News. “Even if we set aside the way these drugs disrupt human pair-bonding, which we shouldn't, the cancer and mental health risks are profound. By putting this on the market, Perrigo gives us another reason to mistrust Big Pharm.”