Wednesday, July 07, 2010

The Toxic Pill

This year apparently marks the 50th Anniversary of the Pill. I lived through that transition. I was a senior in high school (1963-1964) the first time that I learned that someone I knew pretty well was on it. (I didn't know her that well.) A few years later, in an upper level history class at Duke, the professor included in his lecture the impact of the pill on sexual morality. He said it was definitely negative. The phrase "well, duh!" wasn't in use then, but it was that kind of moment in the classroom.

This article
about the "toxic" nature of the Pill (a Glenn Reynolds link) is pretty disturbing, particularly the point about estrogens in the drinking water. Can this be true? Or is this Roman Catholic propaganda? Or is it both?

There was an interval in the late 60s and mid-70s (if I have my dates right) between the introduction of the Pill and the public consciousness of the spread of disease occasioned by the moral unloosing that the Pill caused. Things got pretty wild during that period, although I was safely married (Thanks be to God. Seriously.)

Then the first middle-class STD reared its head: herpes. Time Magazine, which was important then, had at least one cover story on it before herpes was displaced by HIV as the STD of major concern. I had a very good friend who was a bachelor during the 70s and early 80s, and he was a sort of window for me into the Yuppie single world, and that world reeked with herpes.

One doesn't hear of herpes much anymore, nor of STDs in general, other than AIDs. As to AIDS, one rarely hears it discussed in the media in terms of heterosexual risk. And one hardly ever hears or reads of other STDs. So STDs must have all gone away, right? Or we would be hearing about them. We must be back in the 70s, then, in a time of no consequences attending sexual license.

Or maybe it's because the Yuppies of my generation are now running the country that we don't hear about these things. (That's Obama's real problem: he's not one of us. Thank goodness Biden's there, giving us a bridge to Hillary and the return of the Clintons.)

I would venture that the toxicity of the Pill has hardly been confined to the drinking water.

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