In my opinion, every woman deserves the chance to know the whole story,
and to be honored and cherished as a whole person
for her whole life.
Recently, a great debate has been happening around women’s health. We won’t get into all of those layers today, but we’re going to dive into at least a couple. So here goes.
The film by Ricki Lake and Abby Einstein, titled The Business of Birth Control. Is just one of many. Even before this film arrived in mainstream, my eyes were being opened to a wild exploitation of women in health and medicine I was growing increasingly frustrated by over the last several years.
It still blows my mind that women continue to be exploited in nearly every health and wellness industry. From toxic cosmetics to nutrition, skin care and birth control or birthing a child in a highly stressful, opaque medical hospital system today.
Today I’m going to lay out some personal opinions about how we ought to treat women in our society, some starting facts around making money off of motherhood and open up a conversation you’re welcome to join with a big-picture lens.
As a man, there are many things I will never experience like a woman. Menopause being one of them. Giving birth to a child after somehow carrying around an extra 20-50 pounds around my abdomen for nine months is another. I’ll also never have to worry about reading thousands of research papers about health, fitness, biochemistry, drug treatment trials, or otherwise and triple-check just to make sure that enough diverse women were used in the studies listed that we can actually make such strong recommendations for women’s health.
Quality of information matters. Informed consent matters.
I’ll never have the frustrating experience of my doctor telling me to lose weight, gain weight, or question my physique any more than the thousands of advertisements and marketing campaigns I see each week specifically targeting how women think and feel about how they look. And those estimated tens of personal care products packed with hundreds of synthetic chemical ingredients that women expose themselves to each day, multiple times a day that pose large health risks for skin cancer, breast cancer, and endocrine disruption… yea, I’ll never have to worry about swimming against the raging rapid streams of marketing for those items that berate women throughout every stage of life either.
Women deserve informed consent in all areas of life, not just wellness. Teenage girls deserve to know the increased risks of anxiety, depression, poor self-esteem, and even eating disorders with excessive social media use like Instagram.
Women deserve better from every step of the medical system. Informed consent looks like discussing pros and cons of natural birth versus cesarean section for the health, safety, and healthy development of both mom and baby’s immune systems. We now know the many potential negative side effects of elective C-section births for the immune system of the baby, as well as the healthy function of hormonal regulation, neurotransmitter production, and communication throughout the digestive tract for mom.
Sadly, the C-section craze may have been less about real health and more about real money back in the day, as C-sections were more expensive than a natural birth, more profitable for the hospital to perform. And since they can, why not force women into more expensive procedures they aren’t given the proper informed consent about anyway? (That’s a chapter for another day.)
Side Effects
Speak to anyone trained in vagal nerve therapies or pelvic floor dysfunction physical therapies and they will chime on about just how estranged women can grow away from their body, their digestive system and core strength in vaginal birth but also when a cesarean section is used. Now, I’m not an OBGYN, nor do I want to be, but all I’m suggesting is we really lay out the whole story for women before we coax them into risky surgical procedures by way of fear or misinformed ease.
Women deserved to be loved, they deserve to be wrapped in love and cherished as the matriarchs of our society that we so desperately depend on. They don’t deserve manipulated marketing, fear-based content strategies, or to have doctors politicalized, lobbied by pharmaceutical sales agents, or pressured by their hospital system to make more money in their mother and infant birthing units.
In an era of great confusion, hostility, mis- and disinformation around Roe v. Wade (which we won’t get into here), it seems the battle wages on for women, on both sides of the aisle I might add.
Skipping to the conversation of contraceptives, I would be surprised if anyone reading this didn’t at least know ONE woman who has suffered major side effects of early and prolonged use of hormonal birth control products in their life. Shockingly, I grew up in a very small town and I know dozens myself.
From depression, PCOS, anxiety, poor sleep, multiple nutritional deficiencies, mood dysregulation, secondary psychiatric polypharmacy, and many downstream effects of natural female hormonal regulation, it still remains kind of mind-boggling to me that women as early as 12 years old in some places could quite easily be handed birth-control as a provision of healthcare.
I’ll be straight up with you say it frank. I don’t see most commonly lucrative suppliers of birth control pill pharmaceutical “solutions” as healthcare. These forms of birth control may be acting as initiators for churning millions of dollars with lifelong customers (called women), who were left uninformed and uncared for by those who claim they have their best interest at heart. Further downstream side effects like increased risk for blood clots for example is yet another pharmaceutically driven mode of diagnosis towards lifelong medicated masquerading as “prevention.”
Many young girls go to their doctor for help with treating their acne. A common prescription is hormonal birth control, as the docs presume that the development of acne is- and can solely be treated by way of blunting hormones.
If you plant a tree in a small steel cage, does it still try to grow? Does it still try to fight its way out, following its natural biological design to grow tall and grasp for more light? Sure, but the cage has consequences. This tree won’t look like a normal tree. It will grow scraggly and look maimed compared to a strong towering redwood. Now, I’m a huge fan of bonsai trees myself, but not if they are grown in a cage instead of magically sprouted on the side of a mountain.
Sex
Appropriately tailored birth control may have its fair place in supporting women’s health, but I don’t think we use it as such today. The downstream effects of excessive, elective birth control pills rival that of the tons of antibiotics we have used in the past few decades, which we know have severely damaged our ecological biology from farm soil to livestock, to humans too. Sometimes new innovations save lives, but they often are overused, abused, and pose many negative side effects down the road.
Unveiling personal unknowns and innocent ignorance around sex in early age can have many negative impacts on both women and men down the road. Especially as it relates to mental and emotional health, or the crazy but true power of a robust family system being present before endeavoring to raise a child, sex is a strangely celebrated icon in popular culture, media, music, and other forms of influencing humans, but it dangerously neglects the real-life respect, honor, and informed ideas around genuine consequences that sex requires.
Traveling through life by forming sexual bonds before deep friendships or transcendent spiritual connection is incredibly common, and incredibly risky – biologically but also with respect to the brokenness of human minds, hearts, mental and emotional stability. We are complex creatures, we think and rethink, feel deeply and hold onto our experiences. Sex is not the commodity it is sold to be, but humans are often the product of many industries seeking profits over people, rolling money instead of responsibility and empathy.
Sex is not a mystical fantasy no matter how much marketing industries try to sell it out to be. It is as real as climbing 100ft high in a tree as 5-year-old without as much as a safety helmet or placing your 16yr old newly permitted driver behind the wheel. Sex can be a beautiful piece of this puzzling life as humans on this planet, just like adventuring up a tree or driving for the first time. But these moments of life deserve conscious respect, critical thinking, and conscientiousness from our culture and society if we really do care about making sure we do less harm than good.
I’m not anti-sex. I’m pro-responsibility, pro-beauty, pro-health, and pro-love.
Sex without at least some consideration is being inconsiderate.
Sexuality itself commonly commodifies women for the provocation of men, and the profiteering of puppeteers simply using human physiology and inherent desires to muster large financial benefits for themselves.
This is just yet another example of how humans can be easily exploited towards addictive tendencies and lifelong consumerism. I’m sure you probably even know some folks who use sex like an addict, as their brain is simply trying to run from discomfort it hasn’t resolved and seek some temporary comfort, pleasure, instant gratification.
Ever heard of a rebound relationship? Yep, it’s the same kind of experience in addiction medicine, when someone exchanges one addictive substance or experience for another.
Nicotine to sugar candies. Chewing tobacco to jerky and peanuts. Beer to wine. Cigarettes to vaping. And so, on it goes.
Humans and Dopamine
Understandably, many humans – especially in the West – have a severely destructive relationship with dopamine and addictive behaviors and it’s scaring the hell out of psychiatrists, school counselors, family therapists, recovery groups, and many other consciously concerned (often viscerally affected) friends and family members. We want pleasure. We want relief. And we want it now.
Nicotine. Alcohol. Cocaine. Adderall. Benzodiazepines. Sex.
All of these things can be highly addictive for some people.
I wrote this story here for anyone who needs help walking through insight and recovery.
If we look at birth control from a warm-hearted motherly perspective, or perhaps that of a strong and loyal protecting father, I don’t think birth control would ever be thought of as a good option to support a 12-year-old girl presenting with acne at the doctor’s office.
And honestly, I’ll let you in on the little-known secret that some people have used to abuse the system, prancing into the doc’s office complaining about acne in order to be handed the option for birth control to have unbridled sex with their boyfriend. Even worse, I’ve known some ruthless guys even talk their girlfriends into doing this very thing for them not to worry about having a kid, using a condom, but wanting to pleasure themselves with all the sex they can get.
In reality, these probably aren’t secrets to you at all. You probably know many of these stories already.
So, let me ask you, are we really after caring for women’s health, women’s rights, women’s bodily autonomy or longevity when we use massive dump trucks to flood the market of teenage girls and young adult women with birth control?
I certainly don’t think so, but I’d be happy for you to present your own opinion too. I’m sure there are many layers to this discussion, such as the obvious outliers of rape, incest, domestic violence, or abusive relationships where a woman makes the decision for her safety or whatever forced childbearing she may be pushed into.
At the end of the day, this is a truly complex topic and one that deserves open dialogue through many variables with grace and compassion longstanding. I hope you hear others, allow your ears to listen, and in turn I hope they listen to you and your opinions in return. I’m not here to tell others what to do by any means. What I am here to do is to outline some of the bullet points for uncommon conversations, commonly misunderstood.
You deserve compassion no matter the case. You deserve love and respect no matter the past, present, or the future - for we do not know the whole story of anyone’s journey.
My heart is with you in your own personal journey whatever that may be.
With love, jonathan
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