A Physician Exposes the Truth About the Pill

(photo: Image credit: “Bryancalabro”, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Dr. John Littell vividly recalls being at a medical conference a few years ago and asking the lecturer on women’s health why he didn’t discuss the connection between oral contraceptives and cervical cancer. Replying to the room full of three hundred doctors he replied, “Let’s keep that to ourselves.”

The message was clear. Preventing unplanned pregnancies was more important than informing women about the risks associated with the Pill. “Physicians in training during the past thirty years or so have been taught to find any reason to put women on some form of contraception—without mentioning any possible risk associated with these methods,” Littell writes in Verily magazine. In other words, doctors know about the risks but don’t feel the need to inform their patients about them.  Littell, who’s been in family practice for nearly thirty years, admits that he used to be one of those doctors. 

It wasn’t until the issue of contraception affected him personally that he changed his perspective.

After having three children in the first five years of their marriage, Littell and his wife decided that was enough. “That’s when the truth about female fertility really hit home for me,” he writes. “Since my wife’s mother had died at the age of 52 from a cerebral aneurysm, we knew that exposing my wife to artificial hormones would place her at increased risk of stroke.”  So they decided on Natural Family Planning, specifically the Billings Ovulation Method. Using it, Littell writes, “put the challenge on me as a husband to communicate about and cooperate with my wife’s fertility, rather than ending or altering her fertility with chemicals.”

Natural ovarian hormones act on almost every organ system in a woman’s body for optimal functioning, according to Littell.  He cites some of the benefits of not being on hormonal contraception: improved mood, reduced risk of heart disease and stroke, reduced risk of breast cancer, reduced risk of osteoporosis, and better overall energy levels. 

Littell writes that women using hormonal contraception may be at risk for the following:  increased risk of cardiovascular disease, depression, loss of libido, weight gain, premature bone loss, and higher risk of breast cancer.

Littell believes that the Fertility Awareness Method (FAM) of natural birth control “has been distorted in the medical textbooks,” and is still referred to by most physicians as the “rhythm method.” However, he notes that when it is taught and used correctly, “modern methods of FAM have an effectiveness rate of 99 percent, which is as effective as the Pill for avoiding pregnancy.”

To best serve women’s reproductive health needs, he believes it’s time to reconsider natural methods of family planning—methods which don’t put women’s health in jeopardy. “Female empowerment,” he writes, “comes from knowing all the options. Turning blindly to the Pill is not a fix-all; in fact, it’s quite the opposite.”

Littell writes more extensively on this topic in his book, The Hidden Truth: Deception in Women’s Health Care.