ya gotta love the marketing huh?

Calling it "seasonale" like it is a natural and healthy thing to suppress what is actually natural and healthy.

WTF?

I, like the person who wrote the article you linked to cannot seem to gather my words properly for how much this frustrates and angers me.

Taking a hormone suppressing medication is NOT natural and to suggest it is makes me gag.

I took the pill for a few years in my 20's and it took me a long time to get my body back into a natural rhythm. On its own my body has 28 day cycles about 70% or more of the year. I can't imagine messing with that and by the time the millions of womyn who do find out that oops, it wasn't such a good thing to do, well it will be too late huh?

I bet your sickness gets better a lot faster now that your period has started. That being said, I sure hope you are feeling better now.

yes, the Seasonale thing is really creepy. and it freaks me the hell out to think what kind of responses we're going to get about it at Scarleteen.

that said, I did a little experiment this summer, going off the Pill (I had been on it for three or so years straight, and I suspected it was lowering my libido and aggravating my bipolar disorder). I went off the pill for about three months (and went straight to a perfectly regular natural cycle), and you know, those possible side effects aside, I'll take the pill for now, thankyouverymuch. I do definitely have 'cycles' even while on the Pill, but they are much less obvious, and my cramping is *much* less severe.

so--to each her own. sign me up for the withdrawal bleeding once a month, I like to know my uterus is still there. ;]

How on earth did they come up with those numbers? I would think that differences in life expectancy and the earlier onset of menstruation in modern women would have a definite impact in the total number of cycles in a lifetime. Did they even allow for these kinds of things or did they simply use division? These kinds of freaky statistics really piss me off.

I agree with what you said about the cycle of sorts being present. I went for so long without a "period" while pregnant/nursing (and I'm not a birth control pill-taker, either), and I sensed a definite hormonal change. It was evident in my skin and my mood. I brought it up with people before, and no one really spoke up in agreement.

But having been through these various cycles, it becomes evident that the Pill, though helpful to many, shouldn't be taken for granted in its effects. It totally shakes up the way the body is SUPPOSED to work.

I sound kind of like a hippy sometimes.

I could go on about this for DAYS.

The reason women in the dark ages didn't menstruate much was because they WERE ALWAYS PREGNANT. And that being so causes all sorts of hormonal changes the OCPs don't replicate. To boot, they also had much shorter life spans. Hello? But selective reality has never been a problem when it comes to the FDA and the pharmaceutical industry, especially in regard to woman's health and anything one can do to make women's bodies stop acting so gosh-darn-unusual, doing such messy, messy things!.

And they still have no long-term tests on any of this, past a couple years.

Flatly, I think it's bleedin' scary.

On one hand, I am definitely creeped out by Seasonale...though I have been reading for a long time about women on birth control pills who only take the pills with the hormones and don't go on a week-long break or take a week's worth of placebos, thus not having a period at all, so it's hardly a new idea for me.

But I have some pretty conflicting feelings about the whole thing. I have been on the pill for over six years. I was initially prescribed the pill to try to do something about my horrible periods. I had mind-blowing cramps, often hand in hand with a tendency to pass out suddenly, and my periods were very long, lasting from around 9 days on the short side to as long as 6 weeks at a time on a few occasions. Someone will probably say that there are other things I could have done about the situation, natural medicine or a better diet or something. But I don't know what could have really helped me other than the pill. Shortly before I went on it, I had an incident where I passed out in the middle of a philosophy class and didn't feel quite normal for about a week afterwards. I didn't want to take a chance on that happening any more.

Not long after I went on the pill, it became important as birth control as well. Since going on the pill I have been in one serious relationship or another for at least 5 of those 6 years, and the pill has been my main, and almost exclusive, method of birth control. I have thought a lot about other options but they all seem either as intrusive as the pill anyway (like injections and stuff like that), not really effective, and/or really annoying.

Recently I've had some news that was a little troubling. My sister, who has been on the pill a little longer than I have, went to her gynecologist and mentioned that she was having migraines with visual symptoms ("aura"). I've been having migraines of that sort for a few years now, and my sister started having them too a little more recently. Her doctor was concerned, because of information she'd received, that as someone who experienced migraine with aura, my sister might be at a greater risk of stroke from taking conventional BCPs. (Apparently there's some fairly new research to suggest this, though a neurologist my sister saw didn't think it was a big deal.) Instead of the conventional pills, she was put on a progesterone-only pill, which causes periods to be radically reduced in some people and for them to go away completely in others.

It would probably be a good idea for me to go on the progesterone-only pills too, and I'm thinking about seeing someone about that. So, for health reasons (as opposed to convenience, or vague assertions about long-term health effects, as with Seasonale), I could end up not having a period at all so that I can be on the pill.

The thing is, when you're on the pill, having your period is this totally artificial thing anyway. I wonder sometimes whether the artificial period was just instituted because people were freaked out by the idea of non-menstruating women.

I guess this is where some of the different currents of ideas I normally subscribe to start to intersect in contradictory ways. I could look at going on a pill that keeps me from having a period as part of the sort of grand progress of reproductive technology that 70s radical feminists saw as this great hope for women. Or I could look at it as a risky, unnecessary, artificial process I'm putting my body through, as stupid as going on artificial estrogen after menopause (which I think is a bad idea in almost all cases). Or I could look at it as a sort of necessary evil, that carries some risks and has some weird effects but is worth it to me, and I could decide that I'd rather not go out of my way to create an artificial period in that case...There are other ways of looking at it too. I can't seem to settle unequivocally on any one viewpoint.

The weird thing is that if I had never gone on the pill in the first place, I would probably think Seasonale was totally sick and insane and I would be totally certain about that. But given my experiences, I'm not at all sure that's how I'd characterize it. I'm icked out by the name and the assertion that it's "what nature intended" or whatever. But I can't say for certain that I wouldn't use something like that if I had a good reason, like if it were the only alternative to the problems I experienced before going on the pill.

Still thinking about this...

Interestingly enough I hadn't read this post or any of the comments when I wrote my piece on Seasonale. After reading all of your thoughtful and interesting points my feelings are the same. I don't find it "creepy" at all. I'm grateful that it's being developed so that more research will be done on it and women like me will be able to gain more information and knowledge so we can make informed decisions for ourselves.

I'd find it less scary had truly extensive testing been done before it got both released and marketed to the nines, especially with the way it is being marketed.

With something like this, I'd feel a lot more comfortable with a testing cycle of say, 30 years, especially because there ARE documented problems and conditions that arise due to women who don't *naturally* menstruate monthly -- endometriosis, PCOS, etc.

What's most discomforting to me is that one, some of the marketing smacks of the way douching was once marketed to women -- keep those girls clean, in other words, and how quickly it got tossed out there. Having experienced the results of this happening with something else myself -- aspartame: I had unexplained and dangerous seizures for two years which likely never would have occurred had the information that came out years later about the stuff been released due to testing at the time it came out -- I'm generally pretty distrustful when something like this gets shoved out on the floor in a fashion that seems truly hasty.

Especially in an administration when the women's health sector of the FDA has a great number of total idiots in it.

I hated the pill. Gave me terrible headaches. But nobody ever mentioned that when they gave it to me. I wonder what side effects this one will have.

I have PCOS and have gone over a year without a period even when I wasn't pregant or nursing. And my docs have always said that this is a bad, bad, bad thing. Not good to only bleed a couple times a year. They gave me hormones to make me bleed. So I wonder why this new pill is considered okay?

When I first saw Seasonale's commercial, I thought I'd gone insane. Speaking as someone who's been having problems getting her "friend" to visit regularly, I just can't imagine anyone wanting to not menstruate.

I mean, I'm not dumb, I understand about cramps so bad that you can see stars, about women with serious menstrual health problems, and of course about wanting a little more predictability. However, I equate having a regular period with my body telling me that everything is ok. Sort of like those "emergency broadcast system" tests.

Despite the fact that during my "moon" I often feel like someone put my uterus in a vice, these days I really enjoy having my period. I like how I feel emotionally, which despite stereotypes doesn't mean that I'm throwing the crockery and crying every time. I like how it enhances my romantic relationship. I like bleeding just for the sake of it being something nobody wants me to do. I like the reminder to exercise and cut the bad food out.

I feel like the menstrual suppression machine wants me to shut up and go away. Sorry, not going to happen for me. What a whacked out superficial culture we live in when a little blood requires a drug cure.