To Bleed or Not To Bleed

The new pill set to be ok'ed by the FDA, Lybrel (liberal) from Wyeth, can let women suppress their monthly periods indefinitely. There are other pills on the market that let you menstruate less frequently or let you have shorter monthly periods. Where were those when I was young? I'm sure there are side effects, but life has side effects. Menstruating has side effects. Seven years of the Bush administration has side effects.

One of the drawbacks to indefinitely suppressing your period is that if you are among the 1% of women who can get pregnant while taking hormones, you won't have a way of knowing you are unless you've been pregnant before and know the other early symptoms (vomiting, nausea, bloating, cramping, crankiness, sleepiness, etc etc).

I have mixed feelings about this. I never took the pill except for a short time, to regulate my monthly joy of womanhood when it was out of whack, (and then I went off on a sex binge and screwed every man I could get my hands on) but a pill to eliminate it or at least shorten it would have been great in my younger years when I was downright ill every month. I could have worn white pants all summer to boot!

As usual, this is a personal decision between a woman and her doctor. I certainly wouldn't judge a fellow female who wished to suppress her monthly visitor from hell, (unless she was screwing around with her best friend's husband, and then I would have draw the line.)

I suppose that the very "religious" among us will view this as a license for year-round promiscuity- that women should embrace cramps, bloating, depression, crankiness, headaches, backaches, leakage, anemia and nausea because God created women that way and modern pharmaceuticals should not interfere with what God has wrought upon women due to the sins of Eve. But I am jumping the gun. I await word from the religious wrong.