Pill lowers ovarian cancer risk, raises divorce risk?

According to a new British study, women taking the birth control pill for 15 years halved their chances of developing ovarian cancer, and their risk remained low even 30 years later, after they had stopped taking the pill.

This affirms what other researchers have found in the past, and it’s also been discussed that the pill lowers women’s risk of developing endometrial cancer. However, the pill has also been found to raise the risk of both breast cancer and cervical cancer, as well as cardiovascular disease, according to the National Cancer Institute.

But here’s something you may not know: birth control pills actually affect the way your body smells, and the way you perceive the scents of others. This very strange article from Psychology Today highlights some of these changes in a section called “The Divorce Pill?” The author explains that women naturally are attracted to the scents of men whose genes differ from their own, but that pill users prefer the scents of men who are genetically similar to them.

The tendency to favor mates with similar MHC genes could potentially hamper the durability of pill users’ relationships in the long term. While Herz shies away from dubbing hormonal birth control “the divorce pill,” as a few media outlets have done in response to her theories, she does think the pill jumbles women’s smell preferences. “It’s like picking your cousins as marriage partners,” Herz says. “It constitutes a biological error.” As a result, explains Charles Wysocki, a psychobiologist at Florida State University, when such a couple decides to have children and the woman stops taking birth control, she may find herself less attracted to her mate for reasons she doesn’t quite understand. “On a subconscious level, her brain is realizing a mistake was made—she married the wrong guy,” he says.

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Still, Herz recommends that women seeking a long-term partner consider alternative birth control methods, at least until they get to know their potential significant other well and are sure they like the way he smells. “If you’re looking for a man to be the father of your child,” she says, “go off the pill before you start your search.”

Yikes, I’ll keep that in mind. As well as this:

Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico and author of The Mating Mind, noticed the pill’s connection to waning male desire while studying a group of exotic dancers—women whose livelihoods depend on how sexually appealing they are to male customers. Non-pill-using dancers made about 50 percent more in tips than dancers on oral contraceptives. In other words, women who were on the pill were only about two-thirds as sexy as women who weren’t.

This also makes it impossible for me to resist saying, “Get off the pill and onto the pole!” Sigh.

Anyway, there’s no need to go into all the great things we love about the pill here, and it would be nice to just let this ovarian cancer news make it even easier to swallow. But I think it’s important to keep in mind the risks, too—whether stripper-tips-silly or cancer-serious.

Tags: birth control, breast cancer, cardiovascular disease, cervical cancer, endometrial cancer, ovarian cancer, scent, the pill