What Do Ricki Lake, Georgetown University and The Pill Have in Common?

Although the pill has been considered good medicine for over fifty years, scientific researchers are meeting for an upcoming conference to discuss their work showing the manifold hazards of oral contraceptives.

The event, “Contraceptive Conundrum: Effects and Side Effects”, will be hosted at the Edmund Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. on August 8th, 2015.

The event has been organized by Vicki Thorn, the founder of Project Rachel, a ministry to bring healing to women in the aftermath of abortion. “Over the years in working with women I’ve heard more experiences of depression and other health issues related to the pill. The daughter of a friend of mine died of a stroke from the pill that she was taking for health reasons. This simply shouldn’t have happened.” Thorn told CWR. “This conference is a way to help inform women of the hazards of pill use.”

“Women are starting to look at their own health and see what is happening and connecting it back to the pill. Evidence of this is growing in the research, lawsuits over particular brands of the pill, such as Yaz, but also anecdotally among bloggers,” Thorn explained. “Most women don’t know the damage that can be done and there are few voices speaking about the truth of it. Although I’ve been talking about these issues for years, now seemed like the time to put on a conference of this nature.”

“The research is showing over and over that oral contraception is simply not good medicine,” Thorn added, “but this is motivated by the agendas of population control and controlling our bodies chemically. Anyone who actually reads the fine print in the user information and doctor information would ask ‘Why would I put this in my body?’”

Speakers include a wide array of researchers doing research on the oral contraception, including areas like how the hormones affect the brain, nutritional issues, and even how the pill can adversely affect partner selection.

Former talk show host Ricki Lake, who had been an advocate of the pill, became convinced of the damaging effects of oral contraception after reading the book Sweetening the Pill: Or How We Got Hooked on the Pill, by Holly Grigg-Spall. Grigg-Spall, a feminist who took the pill for ten years, has been a fresh voice on the topic, although she has encountered much resistance from fellow-feminists.

The conference will introduce the documentary that Grigg-Spall, Lake, and filmmaker Abby Epstein, are currently working on also entitled Sweetening the Pill to make the negative effects of the pill more widely known. “Our goal here is to make a documentary that could spur a revolution and change women’s health from the inside out,” said Epstein on a short promotional video for the documentary.

The event is open to anyone interested in the issue, including students, researchers, medical professionals, counselors, and others whose work or personal life relies on this research data.