Name: Some Women Are Ending Their Periods. Is That Safe?
Uploaded: 2025-04-04T21:01:20.000Z
Duration: 13 min 34 s
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So I was talking to a doctor the other day. I'm fine, don't worry, we're not talking about me.

We somehow got on the subject of periods.

She mentioned that she, and most of the doctors she knows, do not suffer through periods anymore.

They are too inconvenient, too unpleasant, and apparently not physiologically necessary.

Now, this probably won't come as a surprise, but I don't get periods.

Still, I found this conversation fascinating, so I hope you don't mind me, a non-period-having guy, covering menstruation and contraception.

Also, I should say, I did not write this episode.

I pitched it and then other people on the SciShow team took it on.

But the reason I did that is that I started to wonder if menstrual suppression is okay for the human body.

Like, doing that must have other effects, right?

And answering those questions is what SciShow is for.

If we don't do it, we can't make more humans.

And our species has been doubling down on menstruation lately.

We're having way more periods than we used to.

Like, 2.8 times more than we had in prehistoric times.

That increase is probably due to the fact that people spend less time in pregnancy and breastfeeding than they used to.

But today, we also have a lot of ways to not get periods.

And as I mentioned, I hear periods are not pleasant.

So maybe it shouldn't have been such a revelation to learn that people are using birth control methods to do more than just prevent pregnancy.

What I'm talking about here is intentionally pausing your menstrual cycle and not having to deal with it every month through the power of birth control.

Some people end up skipping periods and going into a state called amenorrhea without the help of contraceptives.

But when your body naturally does this, it's not always a good thing.

Amenorrhea can be a symptom of extreme undernourishment.

In that case, your body might focus its hormonal resources on you rather than a potential pregnancy.

And because hormones maintain pretty much everything in the body, that shift could lead to more broken bones than usual, or even heart problems.

So that kind of natural period suppression isn't really something to strive for.

But artificially stopping your period using contraceptives is a different matter.

If you have any number of conditions like endometriosis, fibroids, or heavy bleeding, it can be medically beneficial.

There are several contraceptives that can significantly reduce the pain from those conditions, according to a recent clinical trial.

But a lot of professionals who suppress their periods do so because of the impracticalities of bleeding.

Astronauts and military personnel, for example, don't always have convenient times and locations to deal with their flow.

And you don't need to be an astronaut to do this, either.

Period suppression can be gender-affirming.

That's not to say that it's going to end your gender dysphoria or depression if you're dealing with that.

But that's better than treating none of them.

So for any number of reasons, a person might choose to take birth control to stop getting periods.

In fact, back in 1957, the first birth control pill, an Ovid, was approved by the FDA as a menstruation regulator.

Before it was ever approved as a contraceptive, the pill was used for this purpose.

Today, similar drugs are still the most common method of menstrual suppression.

Instead of cycling through ups and downs in your hormones each month, you stay in the same stage of the cycle every day.

So when you take a birth control pill, you don't release an egg, and you don't get pregnant.

On the Inovid pill, there was no medical need to have a period at all.

But people who used it kind of still did because of how it was administered.

The idea here was to reassure users that they weren't pregnant.

A person would take a regular hormonal regulator pill for 21 days, and then get a 7-day break.

During that break, they would experience something called withdrawal bleeding, which is the body's response to withdrawing from the hormonal pills.

So technically, the bleeding that a person might have on birth control isn't even a period.

But for all intents and purposes, it's still a whole lot like one.

Many people who take the pill today follow a similar schedule of skipping a week for that bleeding to occur, even though it's unnecessary to prevent pregnancy.

Now, you might have been told that you need to shed your thick uterine lining.

And that is actually true if you are normally cycling.

When you're on some forms of birth control, this is less of a problem.

For example, if you take contraception that introduces multiple hormones into your body, such as estrogen and progestins, your lining doesn't thicken in the first place, so you don't need to shed it.

Which means you can choose to not have a period.

And since the FDA approved that first method in Ovid, we've done a lot of iterating.

Today, there are dozens of different hormonal birth control methods that accomplish this.

They all alter the amount of hormones, like estrogen and progesterone, throughout your cycle.

The main difference are which hormones they target and at what dose.

And from the FDA's perspective, they are safe.

Menstrual suppression is a known effect of many approved birth control pills.

It's just that, also, there's more to the story.

From pretty much the beginning, some research has suggested that birth control pills can increase the risk of blood clots, especially in the legs and lungs.

And even today, doctors aren't sure what's driving this.

It may be that estrogen increases the pro-clotting factors in your plasma.

A study that began in 1968 found that people who took birth control pills were four times more likely to develop a certain kind of blood clot than people who didn't.

This calculation probably depended on what dose people were taking and which hormones the contraception messed with.

But those specifics are a little murkier.

And a 2018 meta-analysis found that some newer pills, like desagestrel, put you at an even higher risk of developing blood clots than others that have the same amount of estrogen.

Depending on which pill you take, the risk of blood clots may be as much as six times higher for people on the pill than those who aren't.

Even so, the risk is still fairly low, at only 12 in every 10,000 people developing this side effect.

The FDA has always stood by the pill because the number of people who would die from a blood clot complication on the pill is still actually smaller than the number of people who would die from pregnancy complications off it.

And that's a huge point that I will keep coming back to here.

When you're not using contraceptives, some of the most common of which are hormonal pills, you are way more likely to get pregnant.

And universally, pregnancy is one of the most life-threatening things we do.

In 2020, someone died from pregnancy-related complications almost every two minutes in the world, totaling just under 800 deaths every day.

Now, of course, this varies drastically depending on where in the world you live and the kind of access to healthcare you have.

So for low-income countries, birth-related complications account for the number 9 and number 5 leading causes of death, while they do not make it on the top 10 for upper-middle-income countries.

But on a global scale, the World Health Organization says that the best way to prevent these deaths is to use contraception to prevent unintended pregnancies.

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So birth control pills can increase your risk for blood clots.

They also reduce your risk of pregnancy-related death, and that's by a much larger margin.

With all that in mind, the World Health Organization has noted that your personal and family history of blood clots should be taken into consideration when starting a new contraceptive.

The thing is, blood clots aren't the only potential risk of using the pill to suppress periods.

Another concern is that it weakens your bones.

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Some Women Are Ending Their Periods. Is That Safe?

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depression