A Very Strange Kind of Freedom

Sarah Vine writes: 

When the contraceptive Pill was launched more than 50 years ago (by a man), it was hailed as the great liberator for women. 

Despite a litany of side-effects —weight gain, loss of libido, insomnia — as well as more serious long-term medical issues such as blood clots, strokes, heart attacks, breast cancer and diabetes — it was felt the advantages of avoiding unwanted pregnancy far outweighed the risks. 

But now a team of scientists from Germany has established what many of us have long suspected: the Pill doesn't just alter your body chemistry, it can also mess with your head. 

According to research carried out in Germany, women on the Pill are 10 per cent worse at deciphering such complex human emotions as boredom or uneasiness. 

In other words, it can impair some women's ability to read other people's feelings, which in turn, say the authors, can affect our intimate relationships. 

On a purely anecdotal level, this rings very true. It's a while since I took oral contraceptives, but casting my mind back to my 20s, it's fair to say that I was more than a little crazy during that time. 

Hyper-hormonal, like having permanent PMT, punctuated by short spells of normality when I was off the Pill. In the end, I stopped taking it, and felt much better as a result. 

Did it affect my relationships? Who can say, but it wasn't exactly a happy period in my life. Certainly, as someone who has suffered from an under-active thyroid for more than 20 years, I know how hormones can affect one not just physically, but also mentally. 

And as the mother of two children, I have experienced the mood swings brought about by pregnancy and breastfeeding. 

So it follows that the contraceptive Pill — which alters levels of oestrogen and progesterone in the body — should have powerful effects on both body and mind. 

And yet it has taken five decades for this possibility even to begin to be acknowledged. As the authors of this study admit: 'More than 100 million women worldwide use oral contraceptives, but remarkably little is known about the effect on emotion, cognition and behaviour.' 

Can you imagine 100 million men using a strong drug every single day without anyone bothering to find out what it might be doing to them? No, me neither. 

For many of the Pill's staunchest advocates, these new findings will come as an inconvenient truth. Especially since, when it was launched, it was hailed as a great liberator for women. 

No longer enslaved by our reproductive cycles, we would be free to control our fertility — and with it our sex lives, careers and futures. 

That was the theory at least. In practice, it was more complex. 

Yes, it removed the risks of unwanted pregnancy and gave women more freedom from babies and the kitchen sink. Yet it also removed their choices in a new kind of way. 

I can't speak for my mother's generation. But for those of us growing up in the Eighties, it led to a kind of sexual servitude, where saying no was made harder by the fact that effective contraception was so readily available. 

Without the worry of pregnancy, sex became almost an obligation. Many of us did it not because we really wanted to, but because we no longer felt we had an excuse not to.

It also transferred what should be a 50:50 responsibility away from the man, placing the onus on the woman. 

The Pill, a liberation? For some, perhaps. But, for me, it seems a very strange kind of freedom that expects women to alter the chemistry of their minds and bodies in large part to satisfy the needs and desires of men.