The risk of thrombosis from the contraceptive pill is ‘far greater’ than blood clots from the AstraZeneca vaccine. Every year a woman runs a risk approaching one in a hundred of getting some kind of thrombosis and some of those are severe and even life threatening as well (article on www.standard.co.uk). While all the mainstream media is focusing on COVID, the measurements, the vaccine and its side effects, nobody just takes a moment to stop and ponder on the above words. Why is that? Could it be that we have a blind spot when it comes to the pill? Mike Gaskins, author of the book In the Name of The Pill, has one agenda: exposing the very real dangers of the pill.

Mike calls himself a truth seeker, wanting to find answers to two questions he has concerning the pill. Those questions first came up after his wife started taking the pill and he read the little patient-information booklet. Then, after a world-renowned doctor lied to him about the side effects, Mike started seriously questioning the little miracle pill, the symbol of women’s rights, that came out on the market to stop the growth in population, while doctors and experts knew that it had an impact on women’s health. These days the pill is not only used and promoted to control fertility, but also to suppress acne and menstrual complaints. It has become a drug that many women worldwide take daily, most of them for years and years.

“It makes you realize how unsafe birth control is”

His main two questions that he explores in his book are whether doctors are being forthright with women about birth control so that they can make truly informed decisions and why it is that the medical community is always eager to downplay studies that find risks associated with hormonal contraceptives. The recent headlines about blood clots from the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines compared to contraceptives were supposed to be reassuring, but a lot of people have started to wake up, according to Mike. “If you just look at the numbers: for women who take contraceptives between the age of 18 and 44, 1 in 12,000 will die from blood clots every year. I’ve seen that same ratio given for the number of patients getting blood clots from these vaccines. In other words, the same ratio of women are dying from blood clots caused by birth control as patients who are getting blood clots from the vaccines. It makes you realize how unsafe birth control is as opposed to feeling confident in the vaccine.”

For his book he went through all the transcripts of the Nelson Pill hearings that took place in the US in 1970. All the information is still very relevant today, 50 years later. Those hearings were held by senator Gaylord Nelson to look into if birth control had even been proven safe, when it was passed by the FDA. There were serious concerns back then with regards to safety issues and there should be serious concerns now, according to Mike. “Side effects, like thrombosis, were discussed during those hearings in great details. Many studies have been done in the years after linking the pill to blood clotting and still we don’t talk about it. Doctors don’t tell women about it, we dismiss it.”

Nobody really knows how many women worldwide take the pill. Mike wonders why that is. Why do we have to estimate how many women are taking birth control? “It is a prescribed drug, so we should know how many women are taking it. In the US we really don’t know, I have seen estimates that range from 13 to 18 million women taking it. That is a pretty big gap. I think it is intentional, they really don’t want us to know. Then it would be a lot easier to quantify how horrible the destruction is. If you take an average of 15 million women taking the drug and you read the information from the drug pamphlet that says that one out of 12.000 is going to die from blood clots, that is 3 women every day dying – and that is just the United States. Take that globally, and the numbers grow to absolutely disastrous levels.”

“Why don’t they present all the facts to women and let them decide?”

For the past 8 years Mike has been very passionate about the pill and making sure women are informed about the risks. During a conference in 2015 about autoimmune disease, the father of autoimmune disease was presenting how oestrogen plays a crucial role in autoimmunity, because nearly 80 percent of diagnoses are women. He explained how estrogenic chemicals get into our system and mimic natural oestrogens, also known as endocrine disruptors. Mike immediately linked the rise in autoimmune disease with birth control and asked the doctor about it, but he denied it, saying there is no evidence for it. Later on, Mike found an article about a study that linked lupus and the pill, which had a quote from that same doctor saying that women should not stop taking the pill because of this study. “I felt that he had lied to me and when I started to uncover the links to other diseases, I found out that nearly every article has an expert saying that the benefits still outweigh the risks and that women should just take the pill. Why don’t they present all these facts to women and let them decide? Lupus was also mentioned during the Nelsons Pill hearings, so we have known about the connection since 1970 and therefore it was not a ground-breaking study in 2015. We have known it for a long time.”

So we have known many of the side effects from the pill for a long time, but still many women take this potent drug without ever being warned of the many different side effects. According to Mike, the message has been designed to keep these facts away from the women – and maybe even their doctors. “If a woman starts to research birth control, she will not find a lot of the negatives, but mostly the propaganda and stories about how it improves your acne and helps painful periods. But, when a woman starts taking the pill and begins to recognize her symptoms, when she goes back to her doctor and says what the pill is doing to her, the doctor often makes her feel like she’s  crazy.”

“It surpresses a natural process in the body”

The drug companies with their advertising dollars control the narrative, according to Mike. They are not being straight-forward with women about the side effects. “Thanks to the Nelson hearings, the pill became the first drug in history that was required to have a patient information pamphlet. The flip side is that doctors don’t tell you about the side effects because it is written in those pamphlets, that most women don’t read.” Mike calls the pill a potent drug and shared that we have lost sight of the fact it’s the first drug that was created to be taken by a healthy person. “It suppresses a natural process of the body, and they give this drug to healthy patients for a very long time. They hand it out like its candy, but it is worse than that.  At least, with candy, we know it is not good for us. Instead, they hand it out like vitamins. They tell women ‘it’s hormones – just like your body makes.’ Women are convinced it is almost like a supplement to their natural hormones, which couldn’t be further from the truth.”

Taking the pill is very convenient, but according to Mike we completely lost the sense of how potent this drug is. “We don’t want to hear things that make our life a bit less convenient, it can be hard to swallow. They are not innocent little pills.” It seems we don’t ask the questions we should be asking.  “The drug companies control the narratives within western medicine. When a woman has painful periods, acne or excessive bleeding, they often hand out birth control as a treatment. But it is not a treatment. It’s like putting on a band aid on flesh-eating bacteria; it may cover or mask it, but it it’s not helping any of the underlying issues and they just get worse over time.”

“So many women go out of their way to avoid meat with hormones, eat green, live green, take care of themselves, do yoga, and then they go home and blast their bodies with these hormones and don’t think twice about it,” Mike continues. n“In many ways, our culture reinforces to women that it’s their responsibility not to get pregnant. In a lot of ways, this has become a tool for men who want to misuse women. Men put the responsibility on women and remove it from themselves. It is easy to say: that is a woman’s issue, I don’t want to talk about it nor have anything to do with it, while the woman pollutes her body with these toxins and lives with the consequences. What kind of liberation is that?“

Birth control or an invention to control women?

The pill was not invented to liberate women nor to give us more rights, even though we might tell this to ourselves. We call it birth control, but it seems more like an invention to control women. “Yes, it is,” say Mike. “If people dig just slightly below the surface they will see that lie for what it is. The entire driving force was population control and they co-opted the women’s liberation movement as a means to get them to accept birth control.”

The producers wanted the pill to get approved in the US so it would be easy to infiltrate it in the rest of the world. Via testimonies during the Nelson hearings, they admitted they did not hold the same safety standards to get this drug approved that they had used with other drugs in the past. With regards to safety, you look at the benefit to the patient versus the risk of the patient. However, in the hearings, they admitted that they shifted the benefit to risk paradigm, as they looked at the benefits to society versus the risk of the patient. “In fact they were saying: we are willing to sacrifice some women in order to accomplish the goal of limiting over-population.”

A lot of women assume or have been told that things like blood clots, thrombosis and breast cancer are something from the old days, from the first generation of birth control pills with high doses of oestrogen. “They assume those problems went away, but that is not the case. In fact with blood clots, it is more likely with the newer fourth generation pills than with the previous generation. If you look at the two most popular birth control pill brands, they are produced by Bayer, a German pharmaceutical company, which has settled over 10.000 blood clot related law suits in the US. That is just related to blood clots, and they have paid out over 2 billion dollars to settle those cases. Two billion dollars, and the drug is still on the market. Clearly the dollar signs are driving that decision. The only reason they have not pulled it from the market, is because it is still a profitable drug. It’s insane, but that is the business and safety is a low priority.”

Mike wants people to start questioning the system. “There is this constant drive no matter what disease. They are constantly trying to reinforce that the benefits still outweigh the risks. Think about that. Is that true? Read the articles, not only the ones about depression, but also about lupus and MS. You need to look at the collective problems with this drug and then decide for yourself whether it is worth it. That’s what informed consent is supposed to be. Unfortunately, you have to inform yourself and do the research.  The doctor is not going to tell you the full story. I want women to know the facts, know all of the diseases that are attributed to it. And especially if you have people in your family with diseases that have a genetic component, such as autoimmune diseases like lupus or Crohn’s disease, there is a much higher risk that you are going to develop that disease as well. Same thing with migraines, if you have a family history with migraines, simply by taking the drug, you are much more likely to suffer from a stroke than a woman who doesn’t suffer from migraines. Be aware of those facts and then make the decision for yourself.”

Side effects we have accepted as normal

And then we have all the ‘common’ side effects, that we have not even discussed, the ones that we have accepted as normal, like depression. “There is a Danish study from a couple of years ago, that showed that women who take birth control are 70 percent more likely to experience depression and three times more likely to commit suicide. This is not a minor side effect, and it may begin with feeling melancholic, or experiencing moments of anxiety or panic attacks. That is not to be taken lightly, but too often it is. They get told that their body just needs to get used to the pill. Or the doctor prescribes another drug, rather than say it is not worth it to take this drug because of the damage it is doing to you.”

More and more women are becoming aware of the side effects of the pill and are choosing to not take synthetic hormones. The question that arises is: then what? There are other birth control methods without hormones and there are fertility awareness methods that, according to Mike can be intimidating for women. “They think it is a lot of work, but it can be actually more liberating as you gain more familiarity with your body. You get more understanding for what is going on during your cycle. Since the book came out, I’ve had many women telling me about fertility awareness methods and how much they love it. Overall, it feels like these are the women who have really been liberated.”

What Mike learned from studying the past six decades of contraceptive use, is that we can’t trust the medical industry at-large to be honest about the dangers of birth control. By informing the younger generation before they start hormonal birth control, we can empower them to make truly informed decisions about their reproductive health. It doesn’t serve any of us to have women suffering from chronic ailments or even dying in the name of the Pill. It only serves the drug companies. Maybe that is what they mean when they keep telling us ‘the benefits still outweigh the risks’.