I hate my period, yeah i know it reminds you that your not pregnant but i just can't handle the stress of having to reshcedule all the time because my period is all over the place and im not even 18 yet(lol) so i still have a long way to go, but i think that getting rid of your period is not a bad idea because for some strange reason my period usually comes the before an event, like today for instance, i was meant to go to the cinema with my friends tomorrow but i can't because if im already getting cramps today it's probably gonna be worse tomorrow and the mood swings are even worse, i costantly feel like cying for no reason, im always feeling sick and i started my period when i when 10 and i still get upset when it starts. And another thing i don't get is why do we have to go through the pain of having a period so we know that we get can pregnant and then go through the pain of bloody labour (IT STINKS!!!) AND YOUR COSTANTLY RUINING YOUR CLOTHES !! and pads are sooooooooooooooo uncomfortable.

Devana

I am 47 and was diagnosed with early stage breast cancer on 8/28. My prognosis is good and I am nine days into 33 days of radiation. I will not take chemo but I will be taking five years of tamoxifen because my breast cancer was estrogen/progesterone receptive. Most breast cancers are hormone receptive.

My point here is that the research shows increase in breast cancer when birth control pills are used by women in their teens and women in their 40s due to the over exposure to hormones. Throw in the meat and dairy that we consumed all of our lives that was produced with hormones and it is no wonder that breast cancer will strike one women out of eight (some statistics say one in seven).

A pill that suppresses a woman's period will probably prove deadly. I recommend Dr. Susan Love's Breast Book for every woman before she has cancer.

http://www.thekeeper.com

and read Cunt: a Declaration of Independence by Inga Muscio before stopping your period altogether.

There's the issue of bleeding as protection from heart attacks and the other things that plague men and post menopausal women.

The excess iron is eliminated through regular periods. It's the bleeding that protects women, not the estrogen. Women who have the uterus removed but not the ovaries have the estrogen but not the bleeding. They also have the rate of heart attacks and other problems similar to post menopausal women.

It has been projected that men and women with no periods should give blood 3 times a year to have the same protective benefits as women with periods.

Women who give up periods should consider giving blood regularly. It'll be good for their community and for themselves.

When I skip my period for months at a time I do not need a pregnancy test, my body will tell me when it's pregnant.

I got pregnant while taking the pill(it was a new kind) and the rock hard breasts and puking all meals before my period was even supposed to arrive told me, heh heh, you're preggers!

It's my very own at-home pregnancy kit. Period shows up, good, I'm not pregnant. As for "bleached" products, any health food store sells unbleached organic tampons, and if you're really "crunchy" to the point you don't even shave, then I'm sure you'd be happy to partake of the hippie cloth pads they sell (YUCK).

What do the rest of you do? Just take a pregnancy test every month?

At any rate, I remember when Norplant came out and everyone (including my dad) thought it was the second coming, and that I should just rush right out and get one. Hmmm, that didn't work out too well for many who followed that advice.

I think, once again, I'll just skip being Big-Pharm's guinea pig. But hey, let me know how it all works out ten years from now.

At least not in all instances. Absolutely it is not terribly common, but I know women who bled some their first month or two while (unknowingly) pregnant.

If the concern is purely HBC failure, why not use condoms/barriers too? And if you are one of those supremely unlucky people who get pregnant with the drop of the panties, you should already know that a home pregnancy kit is your best friend.

Not related - but I also have started using the Diva Cup this last year - nearly six months. I have really heavy periods and wanted to reduce them and stop using tampons (can't get used to not flushing those - I know, big taboo). I figured if I was going to have to deal with tampons, might as well use a cup.

It has it's upside and downside - most of the time I can't go the advertised 8 hours - a couple of days I can't make 2! But it's better than all that waste.

And as for pills/rings/etc - they make me very manic when I'm on them and very very depressed when withdrawing from them. I tried the ring for a week and was insanely manic and then depressed for nearly a month after.

For anyone with heavy periods/cramps who want to try progesterone cream, it's very helpful (in the health food store). Also, you can get bio-identical progesterone pills from your doctor - it's called Prometrium. I take them from day 14 until my period and this has helped things.

Natural or not, all the xenoestrogens in the world have made periods much worse for many women. If I could ditch it - I definitely would!!!!

wilbird

First off -- if you are one of the posters who complain about super-heavy three week periods, wanting to kill people, changing tampons three times an hour.....for god's sake, please go to your OB-GYN and have this checked out. If that doctor blows you off, or tells it's it's "normal", find another doctor! (Preferably a female OB-GYN -- I won't go to a male OB-GYN anymore, they just don't walk the walk.) Periods that heavy and painful are NOT normal. At the minimum, you may end up anemic -- at the worst, you might have a form of hyperplasia, which can lead to cancer.

Otherwise, I wish we could just learn to treat this as another area of personal choice, like whether we breast feed or not, or whether we shave certain parts of our body or not. You do not need to menstruate every month, that's a sort of unnatural condition of being a modern woman with access to birth control and the desire to limit ourselves to just a couple of children. Our cave-woman ancestors were pregnant a lot of the time (although really it was not 100% of the time, not even then), and anyhow, they died before age 45 mostly. So it wasn't an issue!

When birth control pills were invented, the idea was to take them continously and have no period. But apparently this offended a lot of the religious types, who felt that menstural cramps and bleeding were part of Eve's curse and that women should not be allowed to avoid this. Also, that nagging sense that it is unnatural. But the light bleeding you get on the pill is NOT a period, as correctly defined by one poster -- it is simply your bodies reaction to the sudden drop in hormones. It's fake, and it's kinda stupid really.

Birth control, even the hormonal stuff, is still pretty dodgy -- I know way too many women who have gotten pregnant anyhow. So one vote in the camp of having periods is that you know each month that you are NOT pregnant. Otherwise, I would think there is a risk of a woman going 2 or 3 months or even more before realizing she had concieved -- in a political atmosphere that has us all risking the loss of the right to an abortion, this is SERIOUSLY threatening! A month here or there is the difference between an easily obtained first trimester abortion, and a harder to obtain 2nd, and nearly impossible to get third (plus the added cost). I would not dismiss this potential risk, it is real.

As for the idea that menstruating is "expensive": gee, I think that's sort of an exaggeration. I buy a 40 count box of tampons at the discount store for roughly $5 (they are often on sale, too), and this lasts about 1.5 periods. That's not really a vast sum of money. I could save more if I bought a zillion-count box at the warehouse club. Thrown in a couple of Aleeve (naproxen sodium), a really excellent powerful painkiller available over the counter and as a generic, and we are talking about less than $4 a month.

The issue is more about freedom, I believe -- the freedom to go on vacation, sleep with your significant other (assuming he is squeamish about such things), wear white slacks, go swimming and so on. And those are real concerns, especially if you are young. So make a decision based on your own personal needs and desires, and screw what other people think about "natural vs. unnatural".