Eve Shapiro's comment about women's bodies and medical technologies was really interesting. She says on page 50 that women's bodies are seen as unnatural, a deviation from the normal male baseline in the medical community. As supporting evidence she names the non-existence of a birth control pill for men.
In one respect, I totally agree with her. I find it extremely disturbing that birth control pills are handed out to everyone, usually without a full discussion of the risks involved in flooding your body with synthetic sex hormones. A large part of the reason why the risks are not discussed is because no one fully understands the risks, including the doctors prescribing them. Birth control was approved by the FDA in 1957. It was not used widely until the 1970's. Women who began taking the pill in 1970 are only now reaching old age, when many medical problems set in. Personally, I do not believe there has been enough testing to confirm that ingesting sex hormones daily will have no negative effects on women in the long term. The fact that women are given these hormones without full understanding of the possible effects does lead me to believe that Shapiro is right, that women's bodies are considered valid sites for medical experimentation.
However, there is another part of me that wonders whether or not it matters if women's bodies are perceived in this way if the result is improved lives for millions of women everywhere. Would it be better if they had not approved the Pill? Absolutely not, according to the 12 million American women who take it. Without effective pregnancy prevention options, many women would find themselves trapped in unwanted pregnancies and possibly dangerous relationships. A similar situation, although more immediately life threatening, is the advent of HIV/AIDS medication. This medication, though surely untested over an adequate time period (in my opinion) had saved and improved the lives of many people. On a personal note, my sister works in a clinic for women and children at risk for the disease in New Orleans, and met a man who was given a week to live in the eighties, the same week that a new AIDS drug was approved. His doctors gave it to him, just for the heck of it, and he has an undetectable viral load over 20 years later. Would he rather they have fully tested this drug, until the people in the studies reached old age? I bet not.
Eve Shapiro's argument is very compelling, but also must be taken with a grain of salt. I really believe these issues must be evaluated on a case by case basis, by an ethics panel with the best interests of all people, regardless of gender in mind. In a perfect world...
I agree that everything must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. The argument around male birth control was something that I had no thought of in-depth until recently. It is interesting to think of all the things we do as women to alter our bodies to identify more with the "male baseline." It seems that a male pill would be more than possible, but is not something that is being pushed by men. I think it has become an expectation that birth control is a women's issue, and men do not feel the need to make it their own.
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