It’s the definition of Sod’s law: you’ve got a hot date or exotic holiday coming up, you’re all excited, and then you realise that Aunt Flo is about to make an unwelcome arrival. Suddenly your white bikini plans are scuppered. Being a girl is just not fair sometimes. Fortunately, there is a solution; the contraceptive pill can throw you a cheeky lifeline, allowing you to run packets together and skip that month's period altogether.
But an increasing number of women, particularly young women, are foregoing menstruation
every month, for extended lengths of time. Something our mothers would probably look at us with concerned eyes for even suggesting, to some it seems at odds with nature. After all, aren't women supposed to have periods? The official advice can all be a bit confusing too; while i
n the US, doctors generally say it’s safe to run multiple pill packets back-to-back, across the pond in the UK, the National Health Service recommends that you avoid taking more than two packets in a row. So is it safe to skip your periods, and why are so many young women choosing to do so?
In actual fact, the period that you have when you’re taking oral contraceptives isn’t really a natural period at all. The way the majority of contraceptive pills - the most popular form of
birth control
in the US - work is to suppress ovulation so that you will not release an egg to be fertilised, and to prevent the uterine lining from growing as much as it would without the pill. What you’re actually experiencing during your pill-free (or sugar pill) days is a withdrawal bleed, your body reacting to a drop in synthetic oestrogen levels which causes the lining of the womb to shed: “
Monthly menstruation is not physiologically necessary” Dr Ilana B. Addis,
told Four Nine.
In fact, it’s only there because when the doctors that developed the pill initially asked women whether they would prefer to still have a period, they said yes. But this was in the days before a cheap at-home pregnancy test could do the job of confirming they weren’t pregnant, a development that has been important in making women reconsider the need for periods: "In general, I think views are changing really rapidly," Micks says. "That need to have regular periods is not just in our society anymore", Dr Elizabeth Micks, who runs an OB-GYN clinic at the University of Washington in Seattle, told NPR.
It’s easy to see why it’s tempting to just bin them off. Let's be honest, they’re not exactly anyone’s favourite time of the month and research has estimated that the average woman will spend a total of $25,000 on having periods over the course of her lifetime, once sanitary products, pain relief, underwear and chocolate
are factored in. Perhaps even more excitingly, cutting out periods also means you cut out many of the associated symptoms: no PMS, no achy boobs, no bloating, no headaches. Basically, it has the potential to get rid of all the rubbish stuff and save you money at the same time. Dr Addis agreed that in many cases, the pros outweigh the cons:
“Suppression of menstruation has medical and personal benefits for many women, and is cost-effective compared to having a monthly cycle.”
So are there any side effects? Well, the main one is breakthrough bleeding, although this can decrease the longer you spend without a period. According to Planned Parenthood USA, who support the idea that there should be no problem skipping for an extended period of time, this should go away after about six months period-free. So while it might be best not to chuck out those period pants just yet, rest assured that you should be able to at some point. Fortunately, it seems there is no evidence that fertility is likely to be affected by running pill packets together either, although longer term studies are yet to take place.
If anything, all of the confusion around this issue only serves to highlight the fact that most of us know embarrassingly little about what the pill actually does and how it works. But w
ith more young women seeing that they could be saving themselves a whole lot of bother, it seems like this is a trend that will continue to grow. At the end of the day, all we can do is give ourselves the advice we would give our friends - to listen to the experts and listen to our bodies; if it works for you, go ahead.