I missed the news, but there have been the injection and the implant thing for a while that are supposed to stop your periods.

Personally, I think the monthly reassurance that your contraception is working is rather nice...

Sheesh, UK sex education is so terribly poor.

The current contraceptive pill, the combined pill, stops women's periods. All it leaves you with is a fake-period, a withdrawal bleed, that happens when you come off the pill for a week. As medical research developes, they've decided this is completely pointless, and are more prone to telling people to take the pills continuously and not have this fake-period.

Likewise, the depo injection, the implanon implant, and the mirana coil all often stop womens periods.

The is because contraception works by making your body think that you're pregnant. When you're pregnant, it's very hard to get pregnant again, your body stops releasing eggs, etc etc. Also, when you're pregnant your periods stop. This is Natural. It is Really Bad for the baby if the entire womb lining goes walkabouts every month.

Sheesh. You can decide the whole idea of contraception is unnatural if you like.

However, surely periods are just natural?

Well, if we're talking about what's "natural" for women In The Wild, as it were, they tended to be pregnant for about 9 months of every year, and breastfeeding for a while after then. Periods don't come back the second the baby pops out, for obvious biological reasons. So if it's "natural" you want, then a woman would only have one or two periods in her life, and spend the rest of it pregnant.

I'll pass on natural, but the point is, it's not natural for a woman to have a period every month between the ages of 11 and 40.

They may be unpleasant, but they're not an illness, why do we need to cure them?

First of all, as I've just explained, we're not trying to cure them, it's just a side effect of contraception. But even if we were... If your metric isn't trying to improve the quality of life for people what are you trying to do with your medicine? If people are spending two days every month unable to work, should we stand by and say "well, it's natural"? I can see we might not want to Tamper With Forces Beyond Our Control, but we have a fairly good understanding of how a womans reproductive system works nowadays, and I don't think she should be forced to suffer monthly pain and unhappiness just because it's natural (which it isn't). It's natural for men to grow beards, hmmm_tea, where's your facial hair?

we don't *need* to cure them. But I have friends, for instance, that regularly spend a couple of days a month curled up in pain in bed because it hurts too much to do anything else.

Natural, maybe. Debilitating, sometimes. That's why people want to do something about them. Not to mention the cost we women go through of sanitary products..

Ha ha, you can so tell you're a man! ;-)

I can't think I've ever encountered a woman who wouldn't happily dispense with the monthly annoyance that is her period if she could. It's especially annoying for those of us who don't want children, as it ceases to have any relevance at all to our lives.

Lots of things occur naturally, cancer, macular degeneration, psoriasis, hernias... I could go on, but my point is natural doesn't always = good.

I've never quite got this "natural" thing. Either humans and human endevour is part of nature, or all activity unique to humans is unnatural. I don't think that's a false dichotomy, it seems entirely arbitrary to make distinctions about what things count as "natural" or "unnatural" beyond that.

My view is that using tools to improve their environment is what people do, or "natural" if you must. Which is to say using technology to stop periods is just as natural a thing for people to do as using technology to stay warm or keep food fresh.