{"id":1327,"date":"2016-01-16T20:12:27","date_gmt":"2016-01-17T01:12:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/natural-womanhood.local\/?p=1327"},"modified":"2024-04-02T15:31:24","modified_gmt":"2024-04-02T20:31:24","slug":"puede-la-pildora-anticonceptiva-causar-defectos-de-nacimiento","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/naturalwomanhood.org\/es\/can-the-birth-control-pill-cause-birth-defects\/","title":{"rendered":"\u00bfPuede la p\u00edldora anticonceptiva provocar anomal\u00edas cong\u00e9nitas?"},"content":{"rendered":"

As January is National Birth Defects Prevention Month<\/a>, you may have seen articles like this one<\/a> in Time Magazine claiming that birth control pills are not linked to birth defects. It\u2019s because a recent large scale study from Denmark<\/a> just came out with these conclusions. But this study is not telling the whole story and the news distracts us from the real problem. In fact, it\u2019s missing the mark on serious effects of the Pill\u2019s chemistry on the fetus.\u00a0Here is the rest of the story: babies whose mothers have been on the Pill and are thus exposed to synthetic estrogen may not show the birth defects researched in the Danish study, like a\u00a0congenital heart anomaly\u00a0or a missing limb, but are likely to\u00a0suffer longer term effects such as prostate cancer, breast cancer, or low sperm counts. Yet there is a deafening silence and lack of research on this inconvenient truth.<\/p>\n

Three years ago, our daughter created a very clever animation video<\/a> as part of a communications project where she made a statement that the Pill was linked to prostate cancer, which at first glance sounds like an odd concept. Last summer, this allegation was clarified for me when I attended the Contraceptive Conundrum Conference<\/a> in Washington DC and heard a presentation by Frederick Vom Saal, PhD. Dr. Vom Saal is a developmental biologist and professor of biology at the University of Missouri-Columbia, Miss. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The National Institute of Health funds his research. He was interviewed by PBS<\/a> in 1998 on his research showing the relationship between estrogen found in the environment and prostate diseases.<\/p>\n

What history and world health data tell us about birth control and birth defects<\/h2>\n

We must learn from history. Vom Saal\u2019s introduced his presentation by reminding us of the DES scandal<\/a>. Between 1940 and 1971, millions of women were prescribed a drug called DES as a way to prevent miscarriages. In 1971, this drug was found to cause a 40-fold increase in risk of vaginal or cervical cancer in the teen or adult daughters of these women. A major lesson from these tragic events was that when pregnant women absorbed certain forms of estrogen, they exposed their fetus to small amounts of the hormone and it would have grave and irreversible health consequences for their baby. It also showed that these consequences would only show up much later in the child\u2019s life.<\/p>\n

What happened to these women had been previously demonstrated on mice. \u201cThere was data that was ignored because it was animal research that wasn\u2019t relevant to human health,\u201d reports Vom Saal. But the reality of the syndrome showed the contrary: the animal research was predictive of the human impact. \u201cWe know that mouse cells are essentially identical to human cells in the way that they respond to these hormones,\u201c said Vom Saal. Such biological evidence allows him to correlate the results observed in his research on mice and what we all observe in public health statistics.<\/p>\n

Indeed, if we focus only\u00a0on men\u2019s health, which is Vom Saal\u2019s research field, we find two areas are of major public health concern:<\/p>\n