-->Für einen Zyklus-Forscher sehr interessant:
A look at history
Supporters of menstrual suppression point to history. Before the 1900s, women had far fewer periods because they began menstruating later, were pregnant more often and spent more time breast-feeding. Creinin said he is taken aback when women tell him they want monthly periods because they are natural.
"What's natural," he said,"is for women to have one to two periods a year and to either be breast-feeding or pregnant the rest of the time. Monthly periods are an artifact of modern contraception."
Early contraceptive research had shown that daily injections of progesterone could cause women to stop menstruating for as long as the shots were given.
But when fertility experts Drs. John Rock and Gregory Pincus developed the birth control pill in the 1950s, they designed it to mimic nature's monthly cycle, hoping that if it appeared"natural," it would be more readily accepted by women, as well as by the Catholic Church.
Women on the pill generally take"active" pills, containing hormones, for 21 days and sugar pills for the last seven days of their cycle, during which they experience withdrawal bleeding. This usually involves a lighter flow than a normal period.
Since the withdrawal bleeding was not created for biological reasons, many people wonder why it is still there at all.
In 1999, Dr. Elsimar Coutinho, professor of gynecology, obstetrics and human reproduction at Federal University of Bahia School of Medicine in Brazil, and Dr. Sheldon Segal of the Population Council in New York, cowrote"Is Menstruation Obsolete?"
Segal wrote of the original Portuguese edition,"Elsimar Coutinho's take-home message for his readers was that from a medical point of view, menstruation has no beneficial effects for anyone, and for many women it is harmful to their health."
|