Do women need periods?

Image: newsweek.com

Just in case you thought the headline was a trick question, read on.


Six years of your life. Or 2,190 days. That's about how long the average woman will spend having her periods.

For some women, that's too many days, too many periods.

More women in their 20s and 30s are choosing contraception that may suppress their menstrual cycles, says Dr. Elizabeth Micks, who runs an OB-GYN clinic at the University of Washington in Seattle. "In general, I think views are changing really rapidly," Micks says. "That need to have regular periods is not just in our society anymore."

With traditional birth control, a woman takes a hormone pill for 21 days to stop her cycle. Then she takes a sugar pill for a week, so she can have what looks like a period.

But Micks says, physiologically this isn't a real period at all. And it isn't necessary. "There's absolutely no medical need to have a period when you're on contraception," she says.

So why have women been having all these "fake" periods for decades? "It's actually a historical thing," she says.

One of the doctors who helped invent the pill was Catholic. He thought the Pope might accept the pill if it looked like women were having periods.

But the Catholic church never came around to the pill. And when doctors actually asked women if they wanted to have these fake periods, many said they didn't.

Today women have many options if they want to try and suppress their cycles. There's the hormonal IUD, an arm implant and a hormone shot. They can also take some types of birth control pills continuously.

Use of the IUD and implant has risen nearly fivefold in the past decade, a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found.

-NPR Report