“The Birth Control Pill: Unintended Consequences”

By BRIAN CLOWES

Part 1

(Editor’s Note: Brian Clowes has been director of research and training at Human Life International since 1995. For a CD containing hundreds of patient information pamphlets showing that the most common methods of birth control are abortifacient in their actions, e-mail him at bclowes@hli.org.)

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One of the most prominent features of the Culture of Death is its shortsightedness. It puts grand plans into action and makes sweeping promises about how many lives will be saved or improved by its initiatives. And then its architects are invariably shocked and surprised when a galaxy of negative unintended consequences quickly emerge, usually making the situation much worse than it was before. To put it simply, the Culture of Death is entirely ignorant of sinful human nature.
The classic example of this absolute lack of foresight is the birth control pill.
From the very first day it was introduced, “family planning” experts hailed the Pill as the conclusive solution to “unwanted pregnancies.” But continued promises of high efficiency, combined with the easy availability of abortion as a “backup,” inevitably led to widespread careless use and abuse of the Pill. When the Pill failed to prevent pregnancy, many women felt entitled to an abortion because they believed that medical technology had failed them and that another type of medical technology was the “answer” to their problem.
Use of the Pill requires care and consistent attention. Each cycle of pills must be taken in the proper order every day at about the same time. So women often forget to take pills, take them at the wrong time, or lose them. This is the major contributor to an incredible number of unintended pregnancies, especially among younger women. U.S. women who are on the Pill experience nearly a million unintended pregnancies annually, and more than 40 percent of these occur among girls and women 15 to 24 years old.
The method effectiveness of the Pill is 99.7 percent per year. This percentage is extremely high, but it refers to the efficiency of the Pill when a woman is in excellent health and uses the Pill without error. When user error and illness are factored in, the result is the actual, or “real world” user effectiveness rate. In the case of the Pill, this is only 91 percent per year. This means that nine percent of women on the Pill will become pregnant in any given year of use. In other words, the Pill itself is responsible for only about three percent of all failures, and the users are responsible for the remainder.
The 91 percent “real world” effectiveness rate for the Pill still sounds high until we calculate the probability of a woman becoming pregnant over an extended period of time when using it.
She has a nine percent probability of becoming pregnant in the first year; a one in four (25 percent) probability in three years; 38 percent in five years; and 61 percent in ten years.
In summary, if a sexually active girl of 15 starts using the Pill continuously, there is a nearly 50 percent chance that she will become pregnant by the time she is 22!
This statistic is verified by pro-abortionists, including Dr. Christopher Tietze, who said that “within ten years, 20 to 50 percent of Pill users and a substantial majority of users of other methods may be expected to experience at least one repeat abortion.” Note that Tietze is speaking about repeat (second or more) abortions here. These statistics are significant when one considers that one of the primary goals of school-based clinics (SBCs) is to distribute contraceptives and abortifacients to teenagers without parental consent or knowledge.
These rates are in line with Alan Guttmacher Institute figures that show that half of all abortion patients 30 years ago were practicing contraception during the month in which they conceived. Additionally, the majority of abortion patients who had stopped using a method prior to becoming pregnant said they had most recently used the Pill.
The situation has not improved, despite decades of saturation propaganda campaigns by everyone from big pharma to neo-feminist groups. A 2007 Marie Stopes International study found that 43 percent of aborting women were using the Pill when they got pregnant, and another 27 percent were using condoms. And in 2014, the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, the largest chain of abortion mills in the United Kingdom, found that 27 percent of women obtaining abortions were on the Pill when they got pregnant, while 35 percent were using condoms.
BPAS Executive Director Ann Furedi confirmed what pro-lifers have always claimed when she acknowledged that “ultimately women cannot control their fertility through contraception alone, and need accessible abortion services as a backup for when their contraception lets them down.”
The Pill: Unsafe At Any Speed. Even after the shift from high-dose to low-dose pills, U.S. federal courts classified the birth control as “unavoidably unsafe.” This means that, implicit in a woman’s consent to use the Pill is an acknowledgment of physical risk — even if she is not entirely informed of all (or any) of its dangers.
This legal classification means that women injured by the Pill have a much harder time recovering damages. Dr. John Hildebrand, an expert in the field of human reproduction, estimated that more than 500 women die every year because of pill-induced effects.
This startling number is confirmed by figures provided by the Alan Guttmacher Institute (the world’s foremost abortions statistics analyzer) and one of the foremost abortionists in the United States, Warren Hern. His textbook Abortion Practice contains figures that lead to the conclusion that more than 30,000 American women have died due to direct side effects of the Pill since it was adopted in the United States — with a current average of 600 to 700 deaths per year.
It is ironic indeed that the same pill that the radical feminists pushed so hard as part of their solution to illegal abortion deaths now kills five to seven times as many women per year as illegal abortions themselves did before Roe v. Wade. And, with a few minor exceptions, these feminists do not breathe a word about it.
In 2010, major magazines, newspapers, and pro-abortion organizations celebrated 50 years of “The Pill,” and trumpeted how it has freed women from “unwanted childbearing” and drudgery. Perhaps they should tell that to the loved ones of the more than 30,000 women who have died from the fatal side effects of the Pill.
The manufacturers of each of the more than 125 brands of birth control pill issue patient information pamphlets (PIPs) which give detailed information on each one. These standardized forms each have sections entitled “Warnings and Precautions” and “Adverse Reactions,” which list anywhere from 50 to 67 side effects of the Pill. The most serious of these include cardiovascular and breast problems.
The most dangerous and well-documented side effects commonly associated with the Pill are heart attacks and strokes. The eight-year Nurse’s Health Study at Harvard Medical School found that Pill users are 250 percent as likely to have heart attacks and strokes compared to those who don’t use the Pill, probably because the Pill greatly increases blood-clotting ability.
One of the major findings of the study was that women who get off the Pill have rates of cardiovascular disease equal to that of the general population after a period of one year. All of the patient information pamphlets produced by the manufacturers of the Pill confirm that the drug increases these risks.

Intense Scrutiny

Soon after the high-dose pills were phased out in favor of the low-dose regimen, the Pill came under intense scrutiny by researchers. In 1988, scientists at the Boston University School of Medicine, the University of Pennsylvania, and New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center showed that the longer women took the Pill, the greater were their chances of contracting breast cancer.
The risk of developing breast cancer was found to be twice as great by age 45 for women who had used the Pill for less than ten years and four times as great for women who had used the Pill for greater than ten years.
After a decade of accumulating evidence, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified combined oral contraceptives as “carcinogenic to humans” (Group 1). In 2005, the IARC confirmed this classification and has not changed it since.
Researchers at the Mayo Clinic followed up this classification with the most comprehensive review of studies on the Pill-breast cancer link ever performed. They found that 21 of 23 large well-conducted studies found that there was an average of a 44 percent increased risk of breast cancer in women who were taking the Pill prior to their first pregnancy.
These are just a few of the direct unintended consequences of the birth control pill. The next article will deal with the more diffuse impacts the Pill has had on the family and on society.