- Ovarian cancer is the fifth most common cancer among women, and it causes more deaths than any other type of female reproductive cancer.
- The five year survival rate for women diagnosed with invasive epithelial ovarian cancer is 46 percent.
- The reason for the above mentioned low survival rate is the fact that 75 percent of ovarian cancers have spread to the abdomen by the time they are detected.
- A woman with significant family history of breast and ovarian cancers is at significantly higher risk for getting these cancers.
“You have a significant family history if:
You have two or more close family members who have had breast and/or ovarian cancer, and/or
The breast cancer in the family members has been found before the age of 50.”
- Women can lower their risk of getting ovarian cancer by taking birth control pills. “This includes women who have a family history of ovarian cancer. Taking birth control pills for 5 years has been shown to reduce ovarian cancer risk by 50%. The protection lasts for many years after the pills were taken.”
Amanda Marcotte has said that it’s important to give a full-throated defense of contraception as contraception, and not bypass that defense by sticking to non-contraceptive health-related uses of the pill. Or, as she puts it,
… We need to frame our arguments as a full-throated, unapologetic belief that sex is good, women are good, and women’s right to enjoy sexual pleasure without shaming or government interference is good. Unfortunately, I’m not seeing enough of that. Instead, the most important argument—that a woman has a right to be a sexual creature and that sex is good—being abandoned by all sorts of liberals and feminists. The most common form this concession takes is well-meaning, and often person conceding the argument that women who have sex for pleasure are somehow less-than don’t intend to concede it. But that’s nonetheless what they’re doing. That concession looks like this:
“Some women aren’t even taking the birth control pill for contraception! They need it for cramps/endometriosis/etc.”
Every time you say this, a right winger wanting to imply that women who have sex for pleasure are sluts gets his wings. This statement and all variations on it feeds into the right wing claim that a) contraception is not health care and b) that women who have sex for pleasure are so indefensible that you have to lean on off-label uses for a contraceptive drug to justify its existence….
And, to some extent, I agree with her. Most use of the pill is, of course, contraceptive, and the fundamental divide, here, is over the value of that contraceptive use. I wouldn’t put it quite as she does, in “sex is good” terms, because, though sex is, of course, good, the fact is that women have varied opinions about what kind of sex is good, and, regardless of those varied opinions, approximately 99% of women in this country will use contraception at some point in their lives to have sex without babies, whether said sex is in the context of a lifelong marriage, or a not nearly so long lasting fling. Women who think hookup culture is just great use the pill, and so do women who want their sex to stay within the context of long term relationships. Family planning is good, and being able (while doing no harm to anyone else) to have babies when you’re ready and not when you’re not is good. And these things are good wherever you choose to draw your moral lines on what sort of sex is too casual.
Still, ovarian cancer is on my mind. I’ve now had a chance to read Rush Limbaugh’s apology, and it seems he apologized only for the word “slut,” while still maintaining that Sandra Fluke’s testimony (half of which concerned women who were using the pill for reasons like polycystic ovarian syndrome or endometriosis) was about “personal sexual recreational activities.” I’ve seen various other people referencing Fluke’s testimony, on the web, clearly without having read it, and suggesting that it was, sure enough, about her and other law students’ desire to have casual recreational sex. And ovarian cancer is, as I’ve said, on my mind lately.
Yes, I think contraception is a positive good. But I also doubt that you can make it harder for women to use the pill for contraception without making it harder for women at risk of ovarian cancer to use it for cancer prevention. If, for instance, a pharmacist (as is the case in certain states) gets a right to a “conscience” exemption from doing his job, allowing him to refuse to fill prescriptions for the pill without getting fired, then he may just as well wind up rejecting the prescription of a woman who needs to regularly take that pill for endometriosis as one who needs to take it in order not to get pregnant. If your insurance policy (unlike any insurance policy I’ve ever had) actually excludes contraception, then it probably requires that women who need the pill for non-contraceptive health reasons provide proof, sometimes to standards that even women who do have such health conditions may not meet to the insurance company’s satisfaction. And if the day were ever to come that Griswold v. Connecticut got reversed and states went back to banning contraception (not likely, to be sure, but Rick Santorum’s on record saying he wouldn’t have a problem with this), then a predictable result would be some women losing an ovary, or two, or a whole uterus, who might just possibly have been able to resolve their problems hormonally, if permitted to take the relevant hormones.
I have to wonder, given the prevalence of contraceptive usage, should we base policy upon what people really do, or on what their (largely male) church leaders say they should do?
Steve
1. Policy related to legislation should never be based upon religion or church leaders (whatever their sex or sexual predilection)
2. While I believe that sexual relations should be between two persons who have made a commitment to each other that is far beyond friendship or even mutual admiration, I do not have either the right nor the authority to require that others believe this to be the case.
3. I agree that conflating the entirely valid use of contraceptives for contraceptive by discussion re use for other than contraception weakens the arguments that the government has no business regulating contraceptive use. When used for other than contraception these drugs are prescriptions for illness and are unrelated to the ridiculous objections from old men and women (or young ones for that matter) who believe they can force me to live under the aegis of their superstition.
Re: The most common form this concession takes is well-meaning, and often person conceding the argument that women who have sex for pleasure are somehow less-than don’t intend to concede it.
I couldn’t even properly parse this sentence. Evidently Miss Marcotte’s grasp of English grammer is as feeble as her grasp of morality.
Be that as it may, Lynn, your point about ovarian cancer is well taken. While the health effects of the Pill don’t, of course, answer the question of whether artificial contraception is legitimate, they do throw some interesting light on the question, particularly if you’re looking at things from the natural-law point of view of ‘does hormonal contraception contribute to human flourishing in an overall sense’. Because part of that, of course, concerns how hormonal contraception affects women physically, as well as how it affects us morally and spiritually.
Re: Family planning is good, and being able (while doing no harm to anyone else) to have babies when you’re ready and not when you’re not is good
The issue here is that that doesn’t solve the question of *what kinds of family planning* are morally acceptable. Limiting family size may be a good end, but certain means to get there may not be morally legitimate. That’s where we get into the basic question of ‘what is sex for’. Without some sense of what sex is for, and what its essential nature is, we can’t really answer the question ‘what sorts of changes to the sex act are morally legitimate’.
I don’t agree with the Roman Catholic point of view regarding hormonal contraception. I’m more sympathetic to the arguments against barrier contraception, for a variety of reasons. Partly because the Pill makes use of the physiological mechanisms of the human body, and mimics some of the sort of changes that accompany lactation, pregnancy, etc. And partly because of my thoughts about what sex essentially is, and what it’s meant to be. Having said that, I don’t think any kind of contraception should be *illegal*. I also don’t necessarily want religious employers to have to buy it for their employees. I’m not sure that our government should be in the business of saying that ‘contraception is a moral good’. Even though I believe that it is, to some extent and in some circumstances, a moral good, I think the Catholic critique is one that our society badly needs to hear.
It’s also worth bearing in mind that this issue isn’t really about whether people are unmarried or married, so I don’t know why that keeps getting brought up. The traditional Christian arguments against contraception were meant to apply to everyone, married or not (and in fact, the thoughtful Catholic commentators I’ve interacted with in real life or online are generally in agreement that birth control is much more problematic when used by married couples than by unmarried ones, since in the latter case the act is illicit anyway, and doesn’t become any worse by making it sterile).
a full-throated, unapologetic belief that sex is good, women are good, and women’s right to enjoy sexual pleasure without shaming or government interference is good.
I can’t help but think that the use of the term “full-throated” has some sort of Freudian meaning. But, that’s “good” too.
The “government interference” phrase makes me curious. Government not mandating employers providing birth control is “without government interference.”
Marcotte is hardly a place to go for logical, unbiased argument. She’s quite full of hate herself as can easily be evidenced by the “mansplain” definition at the link you provided. For Marcotte hate and bigotry are just fine as long as the “right” people are the target.
At this point the debate is to primarily distract voters from Obama’s dismal economy, rising energy price and rising food prices, an Obama’s overall lousy performance.
@Hector: My sense is that there are two varieties of Christian uneasiness about contraception:
1) The natural law based argument of the Catholic Church, in which only one particular type of family planning (Natural Family Planning) is consistent with natural law. In this version, it makes no difference whether you’re married or not, since contraception is intrinsically wrong either way. This version is carefully reasoned, even though almost no one (including Catholics) accepts the reasoning.
2) Objections to contraception based on the lazy assumption that the only reason you’d be using contraception is to have illicit sex. This version is found among some evangelical Protestants (despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of evangelical Protestants use contraception in their marriages the way everyone else does).
I think that Erin Manning, in her blog posts, takes the first view, while Rush Limbaugh was making an intellectually lazy appeal to the second view. (FWIW, even when I disagree with Erin Manning, I have a hundred times as much respect for her as I do for Limbaugh. Limbaugh came out in support of the Lord’s Resistance Army, this fall, accusing Obama of “targeting Christians” because he sent advisors to help fight them. I can’t see Erin Manning doing that, just to score political points. And, whatever criticism one can make of Obama’s sending 100 troops to help fight the LRA, “The Lord’s Resistance Army are Christians” isn’t it.)
Objection 2 has a grain of truth to it in as much as reliable contraception does make it easier to have sex as casually as you may please, but more falsehood, since the overwhelming majority of contraceptive use is in the context of family planning in long term relationships. Basically, it’s more emotional than well thought out.
The natural law objection is the more interesting one, but I’d still disagree with it, in that I see indications in nature that sex in humans serves a bonding function even in the absence of fertility (e.g., we don’t have sex only when in heat), and that that bonding itself contributed to our children flourishing. I also think that the pill is as natural a form of family planning as NFP (which is, in fact, a good family planning method for some, though not all, couples).
@Dadvocate: Amanda Marcotte’s like Michael Moore or Keith Olbermann, someone more inclined to rally the troops on her side than to appeal to the other side. So I’ll pass on arguing about her character.
I’m ambivalent about “mansplain.” I actually think it does make sense as a term for a specific kind of argument: one in which men try to claim superior knowledge of women’s experience. And I think a man saying “She has to be having sex multiple times every day to spend that much on the pill” pretty much qualifies (any woman who has taken the pill knows that, a) you need to take it every day regardless of how much sex you’re having, b) you pick it because it’s the most reliable method you can get and because you really, really aren’t prepared to deal with kids right now, not because you’re having too much sex to use condoms, and c) it has other uses besides birth control). (If you want to apply “womansplain” if a woman asserts superior knowledge of some male specific experience, such as what it’s like to go through a prostate exam, I’d be fine with that.) The problem is, I’ve seen “mansplain” used in the comments of feminist blogs much less narrowly, to the point where it gets flung at any man who wants to argue against the commenter using the term. This makes me less happy with the word than I was when I first heard it, or would be if people stuck to a narrower definition of it.
Re: “At this point the debate is to primarily distract voters from Obama’s dismal economy” I see it as the reverse; as the economy starts improving more, Republican candidates shift more emphasis toward culture war issues. I suppose we’ll have to disagree on that one :-).
one in which men try to claim superior knowledge of women’s experience
But, not all MEN do that and you lump all MEN into that definition. You can simply point out that particular man is being condescending and thinks he is superior because he is a man, just as many women think they’re superior because they’re a woman.
You touch on an interesting point. Often I hear, “You don’t know what it’s like to be a woman/black/etc.” but the person saying that always assumes they know what its like to be the other perosn.
Hi Lynn,
Thanks for one of your typically thoughtful posts.
I actually think it might make sense for women to be on the Pill even if they’re not having any sex at all, in order to protect themselves against sexual assault. Of course, I’d prefer to have a society where women didn’t have to fear being sexually assualted anyway, and any society in which this is a major threat has something seriously wrong with it. I also am not in the habit of asking my female friends about their birth-control habits unless they volunteer it, so I don’t know if this is something that any significant number of women do, but it’s at least *reasonable* for a woman to be on the Pill even if she neither intends to be sexually active, nor has any outstanding medical issues. (Especially if she doesn’t believe in abortion). As far as I know, Catholic moral teaching allows you to take contraceptive pills against the threat of sexual assault: that doesn’t count as the sin of contraception, since it lacks the element of will (the actual act of swallowing the pill isn’t a sin, contracepted sex is considered the sin, but if you don’t will or consent to the contracepted sex, it isn’t a sin at all). It’s fairly well known, though I haven’t been able to track down a cite, that the Catholic church has in the past distributed birth control to nuns in war-torn African countries who were in danger of sexual assault. Again, I don’t know if women commonly do this. In a discussion on Rod Dreher’s blog, someone brought this up, and Erin Manning said something like ‘I’d rather give my teenager daughters guns to deal with rapists, instead of contraceptive pills’, which struck me as rather unhinged.
Re: This version is carefully reasoned, even though almost no one (including Catholics) accepts the reasoning.
Well, ‘accept’ is a slippery term there. There are probably a decent number of people who use contraception with a more or less guilty conscience, or who use it at one point and then later change their mind, or who try to minimize their use of it. And the ’98%’ number from, I think, Gutmmacher, has been pretty well discredited. The last numbers I saw were that while around 90% of professed Catholics believe that contraception is morally licit, only 55% of Catholics who attend church weekly agree. A recent Quinippiac poll suggests that 12% of Americans believe birth control is morally illicit. Which is a small minority, but not ‘almost none’.
Re: Objection 2 has a grain of truth to it in as much as reliable contraception does make it easier to have sex as casually as you may please,
I think condoms are actually even more of a problem here than the Pill, since the use of the Pill is, at the very least, ‘hidden’, and therefore you have to trust your partner at least to some extent to rely on it, which would tend to suppress the most casual hookup type endeavours. But I agree this isn’t a very good argument, especially as regards the kind of hormonal contraceptives which are under discussion here.
At the risk of repeating a fairly popular bumper sticker, if men could get pregnant, the Pill would be a sacrament.