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THE END OF A PERIOD
IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE

Journal of Healing – May 23, 2007

By Mary Koch

Recent news items about women’s health care bring to mind the Virginia Slims cigarette ads from the 1970s: “You’ve come a long way, baby.”

Indeed we had. We finally could smoke like men, using our own sleek cigs to increase risks of lung cancer and heart disease. The advertising campaign was wildly successful. A report from the U.S. Surgeon General linked it directly to an increase in smoking among teenage girls.

Virginia Slims mastered exploitation and misinterpretation of the feminist movement. I’ve been bobbing on the waves of the women’s movement ever since I entered the work force in the 1960s, when discrimination and harassment were commonplace. I lived it, and I can tell you with utter certainty that feminism is not and never was about making women more like men.

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WHICH IS why I am are wary of the news that a contraceptive pill designed to eliminate monthly periods is due to hit the market next month.

The pharmaceutical industry has been tinkering around with women’s natural cycle ever since introducing oral contraceptives in 1960. But no one seems to know the long-term implications of eliminating menstruation. The Society for Menstrual Cycle Research, an organization of scientists, has issued a position statement saying more research is needed before women can make an informed choice about using pills to suppress their periods.

As a post-menopausal woman, it is not for me – or anyone else, for that matter – to tell younger women what they should do about their own bodies. But, reports the New York Times, we can expect an onslaught of advertising promoting the new pills. A la Virginia Slims, women will no doubt be cleverly and subtly influenced to believe that menstruation is undesirable, an unnecessary nuisance.

Hey, we can be more like men!

* * *

THERE IS one way in which I wish women were more like men. I wish we could afford health care at the same level men do. Also in the news lately (but not extensively reported) was a study by the Commonwealth Fund and National Women’s Law Center determining that women have less access to health care simply because they can’t afford it.

Women overall have lower incomes than men but on average require more health care services. That comes with the territory of being the reproductive gender. Women’s health care expenditures, by the way, include $1.7 billion spent annually for oral contraceptives.

Women have less access to employer-sponsored insurance because they are less likely to be employed and more likely to work part-time. If they’re insured through their spouse’s employer, coverage is less dependable, more restrictive and with higher co-pays.

Women in my age group, 50 to 64, are especially at risk. They’re more likely to be married to an older spouse and lose their insurance as a dependent when the spouse qualifies for Medicare.

Medicaid – safety net for the poor – covers nearly twice as many women as men.

We’ve got a long way to go, baby.

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