In [sub-Saharan Africa] where poverty, tradition and ignorance deprive an estimated 24 million girls even of an elementary school education, the lack of school toilets and water is one of many obstacles to girls' attendance, and until recently was considered unfit for discussion. In some rural communities in the region, menstruation itself is so taboo that girls are prohibited from cooking or even banished to the countryside during their periods. But that impact is substantial. Researchers throughout sub-Saharan Africa have documented that lack of sanitary pads, a clean, girls-only latrine and water for washing hands drives a significant number of girls from school. The United Nations Children's Fund, for example, estimates that one in 10 school-age African girls either skips school during menstruation or drops out entirely because of lack of sanitation.
In 2006, a new oral contraceptive called Anya, developed to "put women in control of when or if they want to menstruate," is expected to hit the Canadian and U.S. markets. Manufactured by Collegeville, Penn.-based Wyeth Pharmaceuticals -- and currently pending approval by Health Canada -- Anya is the first low-dose birth control pill designed to be taken 365 days a year, without placebos (the hormone-free sugar pills taken at the end of every 28-day cycle). Early findings report that Anya is just as effective in preventing pregnancy as traditional oral contraceptives (98 per cent). And as an added bonus, since Anya provides a steady stream of hormones, it promises to quash a woman's usual cyclical fluctuations, virtually wiping out all the irksome symptoms of PMS. Brasner and other advocates of stopping menstruation point out that among the greatest fallacies in modern popular medicine is the notion that women on oral contraceptives -- roughly 1.5 million in Canada -- experience a period every month. In fact, what they experience is "a fake period," what doctors call a withdrawal bleed. "Women on birth control bleed not because they're having a menstrual cycle, but because when they take their placebo pills, their bodies are withdrawing from the progesterone cycle in the active tablets," says Dr. Leslie Miller, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Washington, who runs the pro-suppression website Noperiod.com. In other words, she says, there's nothing natural about it. In fact, the reason women on oral contraceptives bleed at all is because of one man, a devout Catholic named Dr. John Rock, the co-inventor of the pill. Forty-five years ago, Rock determined that if he could design the pill to replicate the menstrual cycle of the average woman of child-bearing age -- 28 days -- he might succeed in convincing the Church to endorse his invention as a natural form of birth control. Despite his efforts, the Vatican denounced oral contraceptives in 1968, but the 28-day cycle persisted because -- fake or not -- women were comforted by the idea of monthly bleeding. (As evidence of how deeply women have internalized this idea, even Anya, which is taken every single day, will be sold in packages of 28 to preserve the notion of a natural cycle.) But Miller argues that since the bleeding serves no apparent purpose -- except a psychological one -- why not get rid of it altogether? But all of this good news, detractors say, is based on the assumption that periods serve no function other than reproduction -- and that you can isolate them from every other system in the body. This, they argue, is preposterous. "Menstruation, this amazingly intricate, carefully crafted cycle, is a vital sign of our health," says Dr. Jerilynn Prior, an endocrinologist and the scientific director of the Centre for Menstrual Cycle and Ovulation Research at the University of British Columbia. "To wantonly disrupt it is a horrifying thought. Regulatory bodies are saying, 'We approved the original pill, so this must be okay. It's just taking the pill more frequently.' But even the original pill probably contains negatives we still don't really know about." The continuous-use pill, she says, is just a way for pharmaceutical companies to revive flagging products -- to find fresh ways to market them by giving them a "new face and a new name."
